Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales

by Budd Schulberg

“Like a million,” he said. “That bum never hurt me.”

  “That side of yours looks like a slice of beef,” I said. “A clown like that shouldn’t lay a glove on you. Next time do what I tell you.”

  “I c’n take care of myself,” The Kid said.

  “Here’s your purse,” I said. “All I’m keeping is the fifty you owe me. The rest is all yours.”

  I always do that with my boys when I’m starting them out. Psychology. Makes them feel they’re tied up with a square shooter. When they get in the big bucks is time enough to split it down the middle.

  “Look, Kid, I figure we’re going to be together a long time, so don’t try to impress me with how tough you are. Save all your fighting for the ring. Now get dressed and go on back to the hotel and get a good night’s sleep.”

  “Fuck sleep,” The Kid said. “I ain’t had a glass o’ beer all the time I been training. I’m going out and grab some fun. I got a heavy date.”

  Why is it that the guys with no talent always obey me like I’m their father? And the kids like Billy with something special on the ball are always trouble?

  “Listen, Kid,” I said. “I been in this racket since you could chin yourself on a bar rail. And one thing I know, fighting and night life don’t go, especially when the latter involves the mouse department. So as your manager, I’m telling you to get yourself over to the hotel and start pounding your ear.”

  “Yeah,” he said, not looking so handsome when he was talking through his teeth, “so you c’n be sure I’m not making it with Shirley.”

  “What’s Shirley got to do with it?”

  “Shirley’s going to the Legion dance with me over to Oklagee,” The Kid said.

  “Lovely,” I said. “I loan you dough. I get you a semi for your first pro fight. And how do you show your gratitude?”

  It was hard to figure. I knew for a fact that Shirley never liked to go over to Oklagee. She thought the boys were too fresh and tough over there. And here she was going with the freshest and toughest of them all. It was a terrible blow to my pride. I would have thought a girl like Shirley would have had more sense than to give me the air for a little pug-nosed brat who happened to have a nice pair of shoulders and a waist that tapered down like a ballet dancer’s.

  When I was leaving the stadium, I saw them at the curb together. He was helping her onto the back of a shiny silver motorcycle. I went over to them and said, “Kid, you got a big career ahead of you. You oughta know better than to take chances riding around on one of those things.”

  “Get out of our way,” The Kid said. “We’re late.”

  “The Kid’s a screwball,” I said. “He’s just as liable to wrap you and this scooter around a tree.”

  “Billy is the best motorcycle rider in the country,” Shirley said. “He won a big silver cup at the fair last year.”

  She had known him less than one day and already he had her sounding like him.

  “I’ll bet he stole it,” I said. But the words were blown back in my face by the blast-off.

  In those next few days they became the talk of West Liberty. They’d go roaring up and down the street on that damned motorcycle, Shirley holding on for dear life with her dark red hair flying out behind her. If Billy hadn’t been the best prospect I had run across in a flock of Sundays, I would have washed my hands of both of them right there. But Billy looked like an A-I meal ticket, and that’s one thing a manager just can’t afford to turn down.

  What I did do, though, for Shirley’s benefit, was to try to break up this thing with The Kid before it got any more serious. I did a little checking around and what I found out about Billy was enough to discourage any girl. At least that’s the way it sounded to me. So the next day, while The Kid was doing his roadwork with his sparring partners, I slipped into the diner for a heart-to-heart with Shirley to set her straight.

  “Look, honey,” I said, “it’s not just because I got the old torch out for you that I’m telling you this. It’s for your own good. I’ve been getting a line on this Romeo of yours. He’s got a bad rep. Did you know he put in sixteen months in the work farm for stealing a motorcycle? He’s a little hipped on motorcycles. He even went over the wall once and stole another motorcycle and they had to bring him back. He was head of a gang of toughs and sneak-thieves in Oklagee. A real Hell’s Angel. A real no-good.”

  “Poor Billy,” Shirley said. “He’s had a very hard life. His mother died when he was five and his old man went off and left him. He never had anyone to tell him what was right. All he needs is someone to take care of him.”

  So you see what I was up against? Practically a criminal we’ve got on our hands, and all Shirley is thinking about is being a mother to him.

  I will say one thing for Billy, though it hurts me to admit it. Although around the gym or with the fellas there was nobody meaner—jumping all the time and full of p. and v.—when he was with Shirley even his face seemed different. The way he looked at her. I wouldn’t have thought there was that much feeling in him.

  “It’s because he doesn’t feel inferior with me,” Shirley tried to explain it. “I guess he grew up hating kids because they had mothers and fathers looking after them. With me, because he’s sure of me, his real self begins to come out.”

  Well, frankly, I wouldn’t know about all that shrink talk. How those dolls can dress it up when they fall but good!

  Billy won his second pro fight just as easy as his first and this time we had three hundred dollars for our five minutes’ work. With a few bucks in his pocket, things sort of went to his head because all of a sudden he asked me if I would be willing to stand up for him in case he and Shirley got hitched in the near future.

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said. “Shirley has got too much brains to change her name to Mrs. Bonnard. And anyway, you haven’t heard the last word from her old man.”

  I felt pretty confident that was one hurdle too many, even for my irrepressible little battler. Shirley’s old man was rough-and-tumble, a bartender at a hangout for truck drivers, and from what she had told me, he had fairly definite ideas as to the qualifications of anyone aspiring to his daughter’s hand. She had invited me home for dinner several times, but I hadn’t felt quite up to coping with him. So I had no doubts as to just what sort of a reception The Kid would get if he actually popped the question to the head of the house.

  Two days before The Kid’s next fight, I had my answer, expressed in somewhat more violent terms than I would have liked. Billy showed up for his workout with a beautiful shiner. “What did you do, fall off your motorcycle?” I wanted to know.

  “Naw, I got it from Shirley’s old man,” The Kid said.

  “Don’t tell me you had a fight with him.” I was always warning Billy never to get in any fights that weren’t for dough. Why take the chance of breaking your hand on an amateur? And getting busted? “I’m surprised at you fighting a man his age,” I said.

  “He c’n still hit you a pretty good punch,” Billy said. “When I told him Shirley and me was thinkin’ of gettin’ hitched, he said no daughter of his was going to marry a lousy pug that had done time. Nobody can talk to me like that, not even Shirley’s old man. So I poked him in the kisser. He takes a pretty good punch, too.”

  I figured that was curtains for Billy as far as Shirley was concerned, that she had seen him at last for what he was, a fresh-faced little roughneck with no respect for anybody or anything. But next day when I dropped into the diner to see how she was taking it, Shirley was on Billy’s side stronger than ever. “I don’t blame Billy,” she said. “That was a terrible thing my father said to him. You see, all his life Billy’s been kicked around. He never had a decent home. So he’s naturally hypersensitive. You have to understand him.”

  Well maybe Shirley knew a little more about him than I did, but The Kid struck me as being about as sensitive as a slab of reinforced concrete. When a girl like Shirley goes, though, baby, she goes. No ifs, ands or buts. I found that out to my sorrow the following
day.

  The Kid won his first main event that night, catching a ten-year veteran in a flurry in the first round and putting him away in a minute and a half. When I paid Billy off, he and Shirley went roaring out into the night on the shiny silver motorcycle he had made a down payment on after his last fight. I didn’t think things were any crazier than usual, until around three in the morning when Shirley’s old man called me, mad as a nest of hornets. It seems Shirley hadn’t come home at all. It looked like she’d run off with my Kid. And in the morning, when they still hadn’t been heard from, it was all too clear that that’s exactly what had happened.

  It was bad enough when I thought about Shirley. But what really hurt was that The Kid had run out on me, too. I had him signed for another main go that following Friday with a jump to five hundred but he didn’t even bother to let me in on his plans. The next thing I heard he was fighting out of Oklahoma City for “Larceny Joe” Banfield, an old-time bandit disguised as a fight manager. It didn’t surprise me, a couple of weeks later, when I heard that Joe had run out on The Kid, copping the last purse and leaving The Kid stranded. Well, it served Billy right, I thought, for running out on a square-shooter who was ready to split everything down the middle with him. But I was kind of worried about Shirley. It couldn’t be much fun being stranded in a strange town with a wild man like Billy Bonnard.

  I didn’t have anything better to do so I decided I’d get myself over to O.C. and see if I couldn’t talk some sense into Shirley, maybe even get her to throw in the towel and come back to West Liberty. When I picked up the papers in town the morning I got in, I got the surprise of my life. That night Kid Bonnard was meeting none other than Monk Wilson, the welterweight champ of the Middle West. That was an overmatch if I ever heard one. The Kid was a promising newcomer all right but he needed to be brought along real careful for at least a year before he could even belong in the same ring with Wilson.

  I called all the hotels in town before I finally tracked them down at a ten-dollar-a-day flea-bag on the wrong side of town. I hustled right over there and found Shirley alone in a crummy little inside room that had nothing in it but an old brass bed. There wasn’t even a suitcase in the place. They had hocked that, along with everything else, when Larceny Joe took a powder on them. Shirley looked at least two years older than when I had seen her the month before. There were rings under her eyes and that beautiful young puss was full of troubles. For the last three days, she said, breakfast, lunch and supper had been donuts and coffee.

  “Shirley,” I said, “here’s enough money to get you back to West Liberty.” I held out fifty bucks. “Why don’t you call it quits before this crazy kid wrecks your life along with his?”

  All Shirley said was “I’ve got to stay with Billy. I’m married to Billy.”

  They were going to be all right, she was sure, after the Wilson fight. That would make Billy the biggest drawing card in the state and they’d have enough money to get their things back out of hock.

  “How long are you going to keep on letting The Kid sell you a bill of goods?” I wanted to know. “Billy is a comer but he isn’t good enough to stay in there with Monk Wilson. A couple of matches like this and Billy will be a has-been before he ever gets started.”

  “I wish you’d handle him again, Windy,” Shirley said.

  “Yeah, I owe him a lot,” I said. “First he runs off with my girl, then he jumps to another manager and leaves me holding the bag. I should do him a favor!”

  Outside we could hear a racket that sounded as if an airplane was coming right through the room. Shirley jumped up and instinctively her hand went up to adjust her hair. “That’s Billy-baby,” she said.

  “You mean he’s still got that friggin’ motorcycle?” I said. “He’ll hock your watch and your clothes and let you live on doughnuts but he won’t give up that motorcycle.”

  “It’d break his spirit if he lost that motorcycle,” Shirley said.

  “How about your spirit?” I said.

  “I love Billy,” Shirley said, as if that explained everything.

  The Kid came bouncing in as cocky as if he were already champion of the world, instead of a ten-to-one short-ender who couldn’t buy his way into a pay-phone booth. “Hello, Windy old cock,” he greeted me, just as if he were still in my stable and nothing had ever happened.

  Well, I guess I’ll always be a sucker for anything Shirley asked me, so I swallowed my pride like a plug of chewing tobacco and handled The Kid’s corner that night. She was right there in the third row and the expression on her face was, well, there ought to be a law against a nice girl loving a bum that much.

  As soon as the gong sounded, I knew Shirley should have been back in the hotel. The Kid came out swinging the way he always did, but Wilson knew too much for him. Wilson just sidestepped calmly and clipped Billy in the mouth. From the moment that punch connected, the Kid was fighting on instinct. His punches were wild and Wilson wasn’t missing. I thought the round was never going to end. There was a bad gash in Billy’s lip and his face was ashen. He was out on his feet at the bell.

  I looked down at Shirley. She was holding her face in her hands. It’s a tough assignment being married to a fighter, especially when he’s a wise guy who wins a couple of easy ones and thinks he’s ready for fighters like Monk Wilson.

  “Kid,” I said to Billy as I rubbed ice at the back of his head and dropped some ice cubes down into his balls to bring him around, “There’s no percentage taking this kind of licking from Wilson. Lemme throw in the towel. A year from now when you know more you’ll be ready for him.”

  The Kid shook his head and mumbled through his cut lip. “I gotta win this one. I bet my whole purse on myself at five to one. Five G’s if I win and we can’t buy our way outa the hotel if I lose.”

  Somehow he managed to come out for the second round. Wilson kept working on that lip. All the color was gone from Shirley’s face. It looked like both sides of the Bonnard family were needing smelling salts. And all the ringsiders around here were egging Wilson on to “work on that mouth.” I don’t see how she stood it. How either of them stood it. The Kid was down three times that round. But he kept getting up. When God put him together he must have run out of brains so he figured he’d make up for it with guts.

  These days, in Vegas or the Garden, they’d stop a fight as bloodily one-sided as that, with their three-knock-down rule, et cetera, but in O.C. they played rough. Wilson kept piling it onto Billy for five terrible rounds. The Kid was down so many times I began to lose track. I don’t know which of them was taking a worse beating, him or Shirley. I could see her flinch every time another punch cut into that torn mouth.

  In the corner at the end of the fifth I begged him to let me throw in the towel. I’m a pretty good cut-man but this was too deep. His lip was pouring blood and both eyes were almost closed. But he wouldn’t let me stop the fight. “I’m OK,” he whispered, “but get Shirley out. I don’t want her to see no more.”

  I went over and gave her The Kid’s message. Her eyes were all red and runny. But she did as she was told.

  The sixth round had just begun when Wilson hit Billy in the mouth again and he collapsed. He lay perfectly still. Monk did a victory dance in the opposite corner. A wave to a friend said, It’s all over. I’ll never understand how Billy did it—he seemed too far gone even to be able to hear the count—but at eight he suddenly rolled over and onto one knee and at nine he was back on his feet. Wilson was so surprised that he rushed in wildly to finish it with one punch. He wasn’t even bothering to protect himself. There must have been some sixth sense hidden in the fog of The Kid’s brain that told him what to do. Suddenly he put everything he had behind a right uppercut. It caught Wilson right under the chin and he started backward and The Kid hooked to the jaw and Monk fell forward and didn’t move again until they were dragging him back to his corner.

  Billy had to have eight stitches taken in his lip, one eye had to be lanced to reduce the swelling and a bone was broken
in his left hand. But he and Shirley had their five thousand bucks and they were going to celebrate. The doc had told him he should stay in bed for at least three days but at four o’clock that morning he and Shirley were at the Kit Kat Klub on their third bottle of champagne. But they didn’t need the wine to get a lift. They were both higher than a kite, just from love, exhaustion, and all that quick money after going in hock.

  The three of us barnstormed our way east after that. The Kid was piling up an impressive winning streak and getting a national reputation. He accepted his growing fame just the way he had always accepted Shirley, strictly for granted. Of course he loved her in his own way, but it was a pretty brusque, one-sided, more-taking-than-giving way. At least that’s how it seemed to me, watching from outside the ropes. Shirley would tell it different.

  I finally booked him into the bigtime, on cable from Trump’s Plaza, where the Kid became an overnight sensation by knocking out LeRoi Adams, who had lost a split decision to the champion. Billy still didn’t know much more about boxing than when he left West Liberty but his speed, ferocity and punching power had simply overwhelmed Adams. A string of consistent wins on cable and Billy was a hot ticket, the Number I contender for the title. The Kid had already pocketed a coupla hundred grand for his end and he and Shirley were living it up in a penthouse on top of a class hotel on Central Park South. The Kid had a closet full of sharp five-, six-hundred-dollar suits and Shirley had a mink coat and everything that goes with it and looked like a million bucks. The only thing they didn’t have was anything with four wheels. Believe it or not, the Kid was still faithful to his motorcycles. He had a new, shiny, custom-made silver Yamaha, and emblazoned on one side of it was BILLY THE KID and on the other, THE KO KING FROM OK. It was really something to see Billy on that motorcycle streaking through rush-hour traffic with Shirley behind him and holding on tight, her wonderful red hair blowing wildly in the wind. For a while there they were on the Manhattan merry-go-round and grabbing all the rings.

  Then The Kid took the welterweight title from Ernie La Plante and things began to happen. A couple of sharpshooters from the casinos, Teddy Moran and Darney Fay, started wining and dining him and before I knew what had happened they had convinced him that I wasn’t a big enough managerial gun to handle a champion. So after working him all the way to the top, I had to sell out to a couple of con men for a fraction of what I figured to make with the title. I thought I had a case against The Kid, but mine was small-claims stuff after I heard Shirley’s. The night Billy successfully defended his championship for the first time she called me at my hotel around three o’clock in the morning. At first I thought she was trying to get me to come out and meet them somewhere and bury the hatchet. But instead she wanted me to come up to the apartment. And from the sound of her voice, I could tell something was wrong. When I got up there, I found her all alone. Her eyes looked as if she had been crying so long she had run out of tears. She had watched the fight on the TV, she said, for ever since that tough one in O.C. she had stayed away from ringside. When Billy won, she got all dolled up because he always liked to go out night-clubbing after polishing off an opponent. But this time Billy hadn’t shown up.