“He took me down to Annapolis to see a boxing show and I’m in the stands eating a hot dog, when Billy comes up running—‘Suit up! We got a fight!’—and starts hauling me away.
“‘I don’t have a license, Billy,’ I had to remind him, ‘no more than you got a manager’s license.’
“‘I’ll take care of that, ’he tells me. So I suit up and fight some dude head to head for four rounds. They give me the decision.”
“Ruby Calhoun, one-fifty, Trenton,” the report reads, “gained a split decision over Ritchie Michaels, Baltimore, in four rounds.”
Calhoun’s purse was held up because he had no license.
“I just fought my stupid heart out for forty stinking dollars,” he complained to Matt Haloways, “now they won’t pay me. They’ve got me pitching rocks at the penitentiary again.”
“Let somebody else pitch the rocks, Ruby,” Matt advised him, and handed him two twenties.
“He was more like a father to me than my own father,” Calhoun was later to remember Matt Haloways.
Calhoun began training intensively in a broken-down garage which Billy Boggs called a gymnasium. It had a light bag, a heavy bag and an exercise bike bought by Matt. Old Matt had done a bit of fighting in his youth and still liked to spar with Ruby. Matt had been a heavy in his fighting days and now weighed two-twenty. Yet he had not gone to fat. He was a big-shouldered old boy who, Ruby had learned, was still dangerous. Matt took the game seriously.
It became Billy Boggs’s practice to match Calhoun against anyone, any time, any place, license or no license. By fight time Billy would be half-stoned, with a bottle of Old Overholt on his hip. Ruby would go out and kayo an opponent in one round or two, then find that Billy had taken his end of the purse in advance.
“Next time you take my end, you fight the guy,” Ruby told Billy at last and began managing himself.
Red Haloways was the local fight fans’ hero at this moment. He’d won eleven straight, had one draw and no losses. His manager was a local roofing contractor named Yan Ianelli. Yan took Ruby on as a sparring partner for his “Tiger Keller”; but after the first half-dozen sessions Red had complained, “Hey! Rube! Hold it! You’re the sparring partner, not me.”
By the time Ianelli had signed Ruby to fight one Emilio Sanjurjo, at St. Nick’s, Red had become Ruby’s sparring partner.
New Jersey fight fans don’t buy tickets to witness exhibitions of boxing skill. They pay to see an opponent knocked cold. Red had not scored a single kayo in all his eleven wins. Ruby won his first five fights for Ianelli by early knockouts. Inadvertently, Ruby had thus diminished his old reform-school buddy, both in the ring and out of it.
When Ianelli began giving Ruby most of his attention, Red felt abandoned. Ianelli had matched him for a semi-windup, in Elizabeth, the same night he’d matched Ruby in Union City.
Ianelli went to Union City with Ruby and Red went alone to Elizabeth.
Red had never paid heed to ringside cries for bloodshed, and had been far ahead on points, when somebody near at hand had shouted “Get him, Tiger!” Red had reached over and clipped the opponent on the jaw—just as the opponent reached over and clipped Red. Down went Tiger Keller.
Red made sure he had the full count before he rose.
“Back to the bushes, Tiger!” somebody had taunted him coming out of his dressing room. Red fingered the Band-aid across his nose. He wasn’t in a drinking mood but he found his way to the nearest bar all the same. In the bar mirror he saw a brown-skinned girl studying him.
“You got a little careless in there, Tiger,” she assured him laughingly. He asked the bartender to serve her another of whatever she was drinking and moved over beside her. She had a broad face, with high cheekbones, which lent her an oriental aspect. She looked to be eighteen at the most.
“My name ain’t Tiger,” he told her, “It’s Ed Haloways.”
“Mine is Dovie-Jean. Dovie-Jean Dawkins.” She raised her glass and he touched it with his own. “Now give me two bits for the juke,” she begged.
She took a small shock at the sight of Red’s two rooms: sporting magazines, empty beer tins, sweatshirts, girlie magazines, old fight posters and ashtrays, overflowing, were scattered everywhere. In the room’s center a barber’s chair rose on its pedestal.
“What the hell do you do here—give haircuts?” she wanted to know.
“Oh that. I just thought it would give the place a touch of class,” was Red’s curious explanation of the chair. He didn’t feel it necessary to add that it had been taken, in a raid on a barber shop the year before, by himself and Ruby. Why he’d wanted it he still could not have said.
She curled up in it without taking off her coat and observed this curious, good-looking high-yellow dude mixing her a drink from his beat-up refrigerator. Then he went into the bedroom and came out wearing a crumpled tux, looking like Broadway in the 1920s, with a high white collar and a black string tie. Then he switched on the record player and the voice came sweet and clear:
Night and day
You are the one
In the roaring traffic’s boom
In the silence of my lonely room …
Then she saw that, though his lips were moving, the voice was that of Sinatra. She laughed, when the record was done, and gave him a hand of applause. He selected another record and the voice came deeper now, slower, less tensely than Sinatra’s:
In our little penthouse
Way up in the blue
With hinges on chimneys
For clouds to go through …
Apparently displeased with Tony Bennett, he switched the record off and began again:
And every afternoon at five
Well both be glad to be alive
With cocktails for two.
“I know, I know,” Dovie-Jean interrupted in pleased surprise, “Johnny Mathis.”
The voice trailed off as the record ran down. Red’s face looked ashen. He switched the machine off, tore off his collar and tie and stretched out on the bed, looking at the ceiling with vacant eyes.
“Tiger,” she whispered, shocked at the sudden change, “what’s happening?”
He rolled his eyes toward her.
“Nothin’s happenin’. Nothin’ at all. I just don’t mime no goddamned nigger.”
She touched his forehead but he made no response.
“You feelin’ all right, Tiger?”
No reply.
She switched off the light and returned to her barber’s chair. She heard his breathing deepen then shift to a light snore.
In sleep Red was standing before a full-length mirror wearing his boxing trunks. Behind him a nurse, whose face he could not make out, was holding out a container of some white, unpleasant-looking stuff to him.
“It’s the solution we took from you when we were testing,” she explained, and he wondered what illness they had been testing him for.
“I’ll get an alternate opinion,” he told her, and took the container down a long, darkening hall, to another doctor’s office. He opened the door and saw a group of mourning blacks in a circle, as if surrounding someone dear to them now dead, and he closed the door and hurried to give the container back to the nurse because he knew now there was something contaminating in it.
He could not find the nurse, he could not find the door from which he’d come, and they were all expecting him. He saw a mini train, the kind that is run for children in amusement parks, and he boarded it.
In a moment he was inside a crowded subway expressing uptown, passing stations in the middle of the track, all the way. He did not know how to get off it, he wanted to go back, the train began picking up speed.
“This is going to cost you nine dollars,” somebody in the next room told him, and he looked at the stuff in the container and saw that what it contained was no more than a piece of ham and a large helping of au gratin potatoes.
Light streaming in wakened Dovie-Jean. Red was standing in the bathroom door, freshly showered, a towel ar
ound his waist. The Bandaid was off. He was smiling.
“You all right, Tiger?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“You didn’t look good last night. I thought maybe you’d been hurt. Are you all right?”
“I wasn’t even kayoed, honey. Just went down and saw no point in getting up, that was all.”
“What got you then, Tiger?” She held his hand.
“Nothing got me. Nothing at all. I get the bad blues sometimes—but who doesn’t? Don’t you?”
“Of course. But they don’t knock me out like that.”
A shadow fled across his face. “I just lay doggo until the bad blues pass, that’s all.”
“You’re like the devil’s stocking, Tiger.”
“How do you mean that?”
“You’re knitted backwards.” She studied him a long moment, wondering to go or stay. Then asked him, “You want me to stick around and clean up a bit?”
“Why not? I’m going down to the gym myself. I want to let my manager know I’ve retired from the ring. If he’d been with me last night … Red left the sentence unfinished. As it was to remain unfinished the rest of his life.
He carried his boxing equipment in a small green airlines bag, and didn’t return until late afternoon. He stopped in his doorway in pleased surprise.
His rooms were bright, clean and shining. There were curtains in the windows. The empty beer cans had been thrown out. Dirty dishes had been washed and were standing neatly on a shelf. His sweatshirts, socks, jockstraps and underwear had been laundered and hung to dry above the stove. He gave her a nod of approval but said nothing.
Later he handed her a twenty and explained, “For groceries.”
She bought them, cooked them, served them and cleaned up after. Finally he had to give in, “It looks like we’ve set up housekeeping, Dovie-Jean.”
“If you want it that way, Tiger.”
Of her life heretofore spent among a throng of brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts, she could recall little more than the names of a few. As none had given her a name truly her own.
Red did that. She was Dovie-Jean Dawkins; and she liked it.
“Meet Dovie-Jean,” Red would introduce her, and add, “she’s my old lady.” She could hardly have been more proud.
Until he got dressed by himself, one evening, and left without telling where he was going or when he’d be back. She waited.
“What kind of deal was that last night?” she asked him the next morning.
“The Paradise, honey. I’m getting into the white entertainment world. I mean the white entertainment world.”
Dovie-Jean said nothing. But when he returned, later that afternoon, from the gym, he knew, as soon as he entered the flat, that she was not there.
She did not show up that night, nor the next. He found her, the following evening, at Rocky’s Hideaway, a black dance joint. She gave him no nod of recognition. Finally, following her about the dance floor, she turned on him, smiled quietly and told him, “I’m getting into the black entertainment world, honey.”
“Let me talk to you, Dovie-Jean,” he asked. “Why not?” was her answer.
“I’m not trying to pass for white like you think, honey,” he assured her. “The Paradise is a white joint, that’s all. A white dude, Le Forti, he’s his own bartender, runs it. I’m his entertainment, that’s all there is to it.”
“You go right ahead, Tiger. You be anybody’s entertainment.”
“I have to live, Dovie-Jean. It’s a white man’s world and I’m in it. I do what I do best, that’s all.”
She studied him a long minute. What she saw was a schoolboy begging for a passing grade as though she were his teacher. She touched his hand.
“All right, Tiger, don’t cry about it. What you want me for, I haven’t yet figured out. But I’ll keep your house neat, and you go out sucking around your white friends while I look at TV. Maybe someday you’ll tell me what you want me around for.”
“I don’t go for white women, Dovie-Jean,” he told her, “I never have.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t have that feeling for them.”
She was uncertain as to whether to believe him or not—and yet it was true. There was dancing in the rear of Le Forti’s Paradise but Red never asked a white woman to dance. This was too early in the Civil Rights movement, at any rate, for that sort of thing. Not in Jersey City you didn’t.
Le Forti’s record player was concealed beneath his bar. He’d hand Red the mike and switch the player on and Red would mime the voice of Eddie Arnold:
You always hurt the one you love
The one you shouldn’t hurt at all
You’ll always break the kindest heart
With a hasty word you can’t recall. …
You could never fool everyone at the bar every time. You could always fool some of them.
“Give that redheaded nigger a drink on me!” a white woman had once instructed Le Forti. Red had accepted the drink and had raised his glass to the woman in acknowledgement.
He had ignored Le Forti’s wink of encouragement. He might become a pimp, Red realized, but he wasn’t about to be pimped.
Dovie-Jean said nothing. She doubted that he slept with white women: why should he when he had her to sleep with? Yet, night after night they slept side by side and he never reached for her.
“You won’t do yourself no good hangin’ around a white bar,” old man Haloways had cautioned Red; but Red had paid the old man no heed.
“Hardee got more sense,” the old man grumbled, referring to his younger son.
Nobody had foreseen the swift color shift, from white to black, which was consummated, within six months, that year in Jersey City.
Hurrying to get in on the big change, old man Haloways and Hardee bought the Paradise from Vince Le Forti and hired Red to tend the back bar.
Red stood behind the same bar which Vince Le Forti had only recently been the boss. Now Red could take the mike and sing the songs he chose to sing, when he chose to sing them. He preferred white ballads to black:
It’s only a paper moon
Under a cardboard sky…
Or:
Come to me my melancholy baby
Cuddle up and don’t be blue.
In the early morning hours Red began mixing self-pity with the Scotch and then his voice turned black and guttural and quietly threatening:
Sent for you yesterday
And here you come today
You cant have my love, Baby
And treat me thisaway.
On the morning that Jennifer Boggs became the bride of Ruby Calhoun, in the Newark, New Jersey City Hall, their witnesses were Matt, Ed and Hardee Haloways. The group then retired to a nearby bar to toast the marriage.
“Are you getting decent crowds, Red?” Jennifer asked.
“If what you mean by decent, Jenny, is lots of people, we’ve got that running,” Red assured her, “only not all that ‘decent.’ The people want to go to church, they go Sunday morning. Saturday night they ball at the Paradise. They come to drink, dance and mess around. That right, Hardee?”
“Mess around, mostly,” Hardee agreed sullenly. He was six years younger, two inches taller than Red and was intensely self-controlled. He’d come of age within the Civil Rights movement and shared few interests with Red. Hardee didn’t drink, gamble, play games or chase women. He studied law and handled the front bar of the Paradise. He’d never yet been known to say, “This one is on the house.”
“Where’s Billy?” he asked Jennifer now.
“Sleeping one off in the coach house, more than likely.”
“Billy Boggs,” Calhoun recalled, “once had me billed for a fight in Trenton on Monday night, and another the following Thursday in Reading, Pennsylvania. ‘What are we doing over the weekend, Billy?’ I asked him, ‘just sit around smoking cigarettes?’ Then he tried to match me against Roddy Nims, out of Washington, D.C. Nobody would give Rodd
y a title fight. He was so fast, cute and strong they were all afraid of him, middleweights same as welters. ‘Fight him yourself, Billy,’ I told the old man, ‘I’m tired.’ If I hadn’t of left your old man,” Calhoun turned to his bride, “he would have got me killed in cold blood.”
Two weeks after his marriage, Ruby signed a contract with the roofing contractor who’d been managing Red, Yan Ianelli. His immediate advantage was that he now did roadwork instead of roofwork.
Ianelli, a man of Calhoun’s own age, was an enthusiast. He got Ruby out of bed at 5 A.M. and off the pair would go for an hour’s roadwork through the public parks. At 9 A.M. Ianelli went to his office and Ruby went back to bed.
“Calhoun is doing something for me,” Ianelli told the press proudly, “he’s proved to me that a boy who’s been in prison can be helped if he’s put on the right track. It’s one of the nicest things that has ever happened to me. Ruby is always welcome in my home. He goes to the refrigerator. My wife is a student of astrology and she tells us when the time for him to fight is most favorable.”
“In Aries,” Mrs. Ianelli would cut into any interview with Calhoun, “the sun is at its most splendid. Ruby is fiery and has a great sense of adventure and an aggressive, pioneering spirit. He is ambitious and, at the same time, possesses the daring and the practicality to realize his ambitions.”
Ruby would take off his shades, wipe them thoughtfully, then put them back on.
“He swims in my pool,” Ianelli boasted, “he has proved to me that he has a good heart. It is only at his insistence that I have taken money from him. He asked me to take my percentage. So I took it and opened an account, in Ruby’s name. I don’t want money. I want a champion.”
“What you want and what you get are two different things,” Elvira would assure him, while the reporter, pencil poised above his pad, would glance across at Calhoun in hope of hearing something worth writing.
“My husband,” Elvira went on as though she were the interviewee, “is careless to the point of rashness. He is also willful and impulsive and tends to ignore the counsel of wiser heads.” She turned to Yan and reproached him directly. “You often fly into a situation headlong before you have investigated its perils. You act on the spur of the moment and pay no attention to what I’m trying to tell you. You are very likeable. But that doesn’t make up for your habit of making a horse’s ass of your-self at every opportunity.”
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