The Telephone Booth Indian

by A. J. Liebling

  Pfefer said that the Italian Sensation, whom I had met in the office, was to wrestle in the feature event of the evening against a fellow known as the German Superman. They would divide ten per cent of the house, which on a warm night like this would probably mean twentyfive or thirty dollars for each of them. In the next show, Jack said, they would both wrestle in preliminaries, while two other members of the troupe appearing in preliminaries tonight would meet in the feature attraction. Performers in supporting bouts receive ten dollars each, a minimum fixed by the Athletic Commission. A wrestler working five nights a week, including one feature exhibition, can count on about sixtyfive dollars. Ridgewood is a neighborhood where a great many GermanAmericans live, so the card for the evening stressed the Axis powers. Besides the German Superman, the program listed a German Apollo and a German Blacksmith, and in addition to the Italian Sensation, it included a Hollywood Italian MovingPicture Star and an Italian Idol. Pfefer, Mayer, and I changed to the Canarsie line of the B.M.T. at Union Square, and as we walked down the ramp connecting the two platforms a big shirtsleeved fellow rushed up to Pfefer and squeezed his arm. “Hollo, Jack!” he shouted. “Got work for me soon?” Pfefer told him to drop around to the office. The promoter explained that the big fellow was the Siberian Wolf, who now had a job in a Brooklyn shipyard but liked to pick up extra money at his old trade. Pfefer and Mayer left me at the door of the Ridgewood Grove Arena, a low, widespread, wooden building, and I walked over to a German saloon on St. Nicholas Avenue and had my supper.

  When I returned, the crowd was beginning to arrive at the Grove. Most of the men were in shirt sleeves, and about half of them wore stiff straw hats. They moved forward heavily, with the experienced air of men going to church on Sunday and prepared to criticize the sermon. There were a good many women with them, most of them shapeless and wearing house dresses.

  Pfefer had given me a workingpress ticket, which calls for a seat directly at the ringside. The ushers looked surprised when I sat down there. No newspaperman had covered a wrestling show at the Grove for years. The only other person in the first row at my side of the ring was one of the judges, an old boxing referee whose legs have gone bad. Although the Athletic Commission concedes that wrestling exhibitions are not contests, it insists on the presence of two licensed judges and an inspector, as well as a referee and a doctor. The referee gets fifteen dollars and the others ten dollars each.

  The first exhibition brought together the Polish Goliath, a vast and bulbous youth who, according to the announcer, weighed 310 pounds, and the Italian Idol, a strongly built fellow weighing a mere 195. As soon as the Goliath appeared, wearing a dingy bathrobe with a Polish eagle sewn on the back, the crowd began to boo. This was partly because he had such an advantage in weight and partly because of Poland's antiGerman foreign policy. When the bout began the Italian Idol clamped an arm lock on the Goliath's left arm and started to twist it. The Goliath contorted his face in a simulation of agony. A fellow in the crowd shouted to the Italian Idol, “Break it off!” Soon the rest of the audience took up the chant, “Break it off! Break it off!” The Italian Idol seemed to put a great deal of pressure on the arm, but when the Goliath merely waved his wrist the Idol not only lost the hold but fell flat on his back. From what I could recollect of a few painful experiments in college wrestling, this seemed a remarkably easy way to break a hold, but it convinced a man behind me. “Jeez, he's strong!” the man exclaimed in an awed tone. I could hear variations of the same comment all over the hall. But the Pole seemed as stupid as he was powerful. He just stood there glaring at the prostrate Idol instead of pouncing on him. Then he turned to the audience, raised one fat fist, and solemnly thumped it against his nearly hairless chest. The crowd exploded in fury, booing and whistling. The Goliath turned toward the Idol and waddled slowly forward. He put his feet together and made as if to jump on the Idol. The Italian wriggled out of the way and got to his feet, and the referee, a lively young man, shook a finger warningly at the Goliath. The putative Pole demanded loudly, “What's the matter with that?” He said it in good clear Brooklynese, for, as I later learned, he is a native of South Brooklyn. But the crowd, convinced in spite of their own ears that a Polish Goliath talks with an outlandish accent, shouted back mockingly, “Vot's der mottur vit dot?”

  While the Goliath was talking to the referee, the Italian Idol, miraculously revitalized, rushed across the ring and butted his opponent in the rear. The Goliath fell partly through the ropes. When he disentangled himself, he turned to the referee. “Why don't you watch that, ref?” he bellowed. The fans shouted in unison, “Vy don't you votch dot, ref?” It was a kind of litany. The wrestlers repeated the armlock routine three times, and then the Goliath got both arms around the Idol's head, pulled him forward and pushed his head down. The Goliath's face reflected an ogreish pleasure. The Idol stamped as if in acute pain. I looked up under the ropes and saw the Idol's face, which was invisible to the crowd. He was laughing. The sympathetic fans shouted, “Referee! Referee! Strangle hold!” One fellow screamed, “We had a good referee here last week, you butcher!” Then the man behind me yelled, “Step on his feet!” The Italian Idol promptly stepped on the Pole's feet, and the Goliath let him go. One of the Goliath's most effective gestures for inciting boos was to stand back, place his hands on his large, womanish hips, and puff out his chest and stomach. Another was to put his left hand on the Italian's right ear and then, with his right hand, twist his own left thumb. This looked as if he were twisting the Idol's ear off. After about fifteen minutes of such charades, the Goliath grabbed the Idol by the hair on top of the head and threw him over his left shoulder. I thought the Idol must have cooperated in this maneuver, but the crowd took it literally. The Idol lay as if stunned, and the Goliath fell on him. The referee slapped the Goliath on the back to signify victory. The fans booed angrily, but there was a note of anticipation in their howls, as if they knew that sooner or later they would have the pleasure of seeing the Goliath ground in the dust. In the meantime they would continue to come to the shows whenever he was billed.

  The principals in the second exhibition were the Irish Wild Man and the German Apollo. In some neighborhoods, Irish athletes are presented in an endearing light, but not in Ridgewood. This was immediately apparent when the Irish Wild Man refused to shake hands with the German Apollo before they came to grips. The man behind me yelled, “Make it short and snappy, Fritz! He wouldn't shake hands with you!” The Wild Man, a stocky fellow with a considerable paunch, evidently had been in the navy or a side show, for he was almost covered with tattooing. Soon after the bell rang he hit the Apollo on the jaw with his fist and knocked him down. From my seat, I could see that the blow had really landed on the Wild Man's own left hand, which he had carefully placed on the Apollo's neck before swinging his right. The crowd booed frantically, because hitting with the fist is a foul. The Apollo got up, staggering. The Wild Man knocked him down again, with a terrific blow that missed him. The referee intervened and held the raging Wild Man away while the Apollo got up and walked around the ring, apparently in quest of consciousness. Then, when the referee turned the Wild Man loose, the Apollo hit the villainous Irishman a ferocious punch on the breastbone. The Wild Man went down with a crash, which he produced by kicking the mat with his heels. The fans shouted triumphantly. “How do you like that, you mick?” the man behind me cried.

  When the Wild Man got up he immediately started to run away from the Apollo, who followed him relentlessly. Every time the Wild Man got into a corner of the ring, he would turn and hold both arms wide, as if disclaiming evil intent. Occasionally he would hold out his hand to shake, but the Apollo, who played his role straight, would disdain the proffered clasp. Then the Wild Man would jump out of the ring and stay outside the ropes until the referee argued him into returning. The referee pleaded with the Apollo, who finally nodded a majestic forgiveness. The Wild Man held out his hand again in friendship, and the guileless German reached to grasp it. Instantly the Wild Man hit him
on the jaw again. I saw his fist pass behind the Apollo's head, but anyway the German fell down. The Wild Man loosed a peal of depraved laughter and then started to kick the Apollo's prone form. The Apollo sat up moaning and rubbing his groin. A lynching seemed imminent. Suddenly the Apollo, galvanized by righteous anger, jumped up, seized the Wild Man by the head, and threw him down. Then he began to twist the Wild Man's left foot, to the accompaniment of a cadenced chant of “Break it off!” in which all the lady spectators joined with shrill fervor. The Irish Wild Man rolled his eyes and groaned, rather incongruously, “Ach! Ach!” He pounded the mat with his hands, but got no sympathy. Shortly afterward the Apollo pinned the Wild Man's shoulders to the mat, amid hosannas of Teutonic triumph. Mr. Pfefer had slid into a seat beside me and was observing the Wild Man's moues with the intent appreciation of a McClintic watching a Cornell.

  “A nice boy, the Wild Man,” the promoter said as the Irishman climbed down from the ring, shaking his fists at the crowd. “He got five children, and he's so good he couldn't hurt a fly on the wall. But in the ring he acts like a wildcap. He is a good villain, the dope. In every match must be a hero and a villain or else a funny maker. The villains and the funny makers are the hardest ones to develop.”

  Both of my acquaintances of the afternoon, the Italian Sensation and the Mighty Magyar, appeared to fall within the hero category. The Magyar threw the Hollywood Italian MovingPicture Star, a large gentleman who seemed to me a poor reflection of the Polish Goliath, employing the same comedy technique but less effectively. The Italian Sensation lost to the German Superman. Of all the wrestlers on the card, the Superman, a recent emigre, seemed the one most puzzled by the proceedings. When he grabbed the Sensation and the latter came off the floor as lightly as the woman in an adagio team, the Superman was obviously astonished. But he did the only thing feasible—he let the Sensation fall with a crash. This produced an impression of boundless strength. “He'll learn,” Pfefer said. “He'll be someday a wonderful funny maker.”

  Earlier in the evening, I had turned around to look at the vociferous man in the row behind me, and had been surprised to recognize in him an outwardly cynical waiter from the Gaiety Delicatessen near Longacre Square, a place I go to occasionally As the principals in the final exhibition climbed into the ring, I stole another glance at the waiter. He was white with emotion, and his tongue protruded between his lips. He stared at the Abyssinian Gorilla Man with the horror that suggestible visitors to the Bronx Zoo reptile house sometimes show before a python. As the exhibition was about to begin, the waiter plucked at the arm of the man next to him. “That man's a murderer,” he said. “I seen him wrestle before. It shouldn't be allowed—not with a human being.”

  The Gorilla's opponent in the closing turn was the German Blacksmith, a creamyskinned, blueeyed, and goldenhaired youth who could have posed for an illustration in a Hitler primer. The Gorilla Man dragged this Aryan god toward the ropes and pretended to rub the Blacksmith's eyes out against the top strand. The referee tore the Gorilla Man from his prey. The Gorilla Man made a motion to strike the referee. The Blacksmith held his arm over his eyes. The fans expected to see a couple of bloody sockets when the arm dropped. But his eyesight had been miraculously preserved. The Gorilla Man treacherously extended his hand. The fans shouted, “No, no! Don't shake!”

  The Gorilla Man then sneakily got behind the Nordic and began to strangle him. The referee made him release his unfair hold. The Blacksmith coughed desperately to indicate the degree of strangulation. The Gorilla Man grabbed him from behind again. It seemed unlikely that he understood the referee's English. He was an untrammeled savage. “Stop it!” my friend the waiter shrieked. “For God's sake, stop it!” The German did not seem to know what to do. Suddenly my friend had an idea. “Pull his whiskers!” he shouted. The German Blacksmith appeared to hear. He reached behind him and pulled at the Gorilla Man's long black beard. The Gorilla Man let out a wild scream and released his hold. He jumped up and down in the center of the ring clutching his whiskers. Then, with another shout, he leaped at the Blacksmith again and got another strangle hold. But now the fans had the answer. “Pull his whiskers!” they shouted joyfully. The Blacksmith pulled; the Gorilla danced and then took another hold. “Pull his whiskers!” came the chorus. The sequence was repeated four more times. At length the Blacksmith butted the Gorilla Man in the stomach. The latter fell down, still holding his whiskers, and the Blacksmith pinned his GraecoAbyssinian shoulders to the mat. On the way to the nearest exit I caught up to my friend the waiter and greeted him. He looked at me a trifle sheepishly and said, “How did you like the show? I never take it serious.” Mr. Pfefer, at my other elbow, said, “We did only about six hundred dollars, the bums.”

  About the Author

  A. J. Liebling joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and stayed there until his death in 1963. His many books included The Earl of Louisiana, Back Where I Come From, Between Meals, and The Sweet Science, which was recently voted the finest sports book of all time.

  About the Series Editor

  Luc Sante is a renowned writer and critic and author of the classic book on the raffish, violent, and criminal side of New York, Low Life. He also wrote the introduction for Anchor Books's reissue of the David Maurer classic, The Big Con. An authority on the history of photography, Sante is now a professor at Bard College.

  The Broadway Library of Larceny

  The Library of Larceny is a collection of books about—and sometimes by—people who exploit public confidence for their own personal monetary gain. Some of them are thieves pure and simple. Some are getalong types who just happen to be standing nearby with pockets flapping when spoils are divided. And some are con artists—with equal stress on the second word of that formula—men and women who do not steal, exactly, and certainly never employ violence or strongarm tactics, but who extract sums by means of a sort of psychic jujitsu from pigeons who are often all too willing to be plucked. These books fall into the truecrime genre, but that genre (once dominated by pipesmoking sleuths) has lately been given over almost entirely to depressing psychopathology and gore for gore's sake. The Library of Larceny proposes instead to restore property crime to its full, glorious stature. It is, after all, a portion of the inheritance of this Land of Opportunity.

  The books in the series highlight their subjects' ingenuity, delight in the aesthetics of their profession, their artisanal pride in a neatly turned score, and, not incidentally, their pleasure in language. For whatever reasons, swindling seems to awaken in its perpetrators a gift for vigorous, highly colored language, with accompanying deadpan humor. The metaphors so often come from the natural world—a victim is a “doe” or an “apple”; he or she is “lopeared”; a dollar bill is a “fish” or a “bumblebee”—that it is as if we were listening to lions and tigers discussing their jobs. Add to all this an inside view of a world of poolrooms and racetracks and bars and brothels, the raffish world of professional leisure. The books will span the past century, stretching from the time after the West had been won—and the wildlife that had evolved along the way sought new outlets for its talents—right up to the present era of corporate malfeasance, by way of the hectic, wisedup city life of the Cocktail Age. The books, many of them long out of print, will appeal to a wide range of readers, young and old: hipsters, pirates, roues, scalawags, poets, armchair psychologists, advertising strategists, cultural theorists, promoters, touts, sibyls, and bon vivants everywhere.

  Luc Sante

  Series Editor

  THE TELEPHONE BOOTH INDIAN. Copyright © 1942 by A. J. Liebling, renewed 1969 by Jean Stafford Liebling. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, contact: Broadway Books, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  HC108.7.L54 2004

  eISBN: 978-0-307-48066-8

  v3.0