And the part I missed the most was the fights.
I’ll tell you why. Because all the old saws about boxing are true. There’s no room for ambiguity in the ring. You know who the winners and the losers are. There, in that little square, under the big light, two guys put it all on the line, face each other without lawyers or tax attorneys. They stare at each other without speaking. They are stripped even of words. Boxers don’t call each other names. They don’t wave their arms and posture. They don’t yell, Hey, fuck you, you fucking bastard, you want a piece of me, huh, well, come and get it, you fucking douche bag . . . while they’re walking backward, glancing around, praying for a cop. Boxers don’t file suit or turn you in to the IRS. They don’t subscribe to dirty magazines in your name and have them mailed to your house. They don’t plant rumors about drugs or how maybe you’re a queer. Boxers don’t come at you from behind some piece of paper a guy you never saw before hands you as you step out your front door. Boxers don’t drop letters in the suggestion box or complain to your boss that you don’t have what it takes anymore. Boxers don’t approach at a slant. Boxers stride to the center of the ring, raise their hands, and fight. That was what I’d always loved about them, that they were nothing like the rest of us.
Even so, I hadn’t seen a match in the Garden or anywhere else for more than twenty years when I got on the Crosstown 42 that night, and the whole feel of the ring, the noise and the smoke, had by then drifted into a place within me I didn’t visit anymore. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read a boxing story in the paper, or so much as glanced at Ring magazine. As a matter of fact, that very night I’d plucked a Newsweek from the rack instead, then tramped onto the bus, planning to pick up a little moo shoo pork when I got off, then trudge home to read about this East Hampton obstetrician who’d given some Jamaican bedpan jockey five large to shoot his wife.
Then, out of the blue, I saw him.
He was crouched in the back corner of the bus, his face turned toward the glass, peering out at the street, though he didn’t seem to be watching anything in particular. His eyes had that look you’ve all seen. Nothing going in, precious little coming out. A dead, dull stare.
His clothes were so shabby that if I hadn’t noticed the profile, the gnarled ear and flattened nose, I might have mistaken him for a pile of dirty laundry. Everything was torn, ragged, the scarf around his neck riddled with holes, bare fingers nosing through dark blue gloves. It was the kind of shabbiness that carries its own odor, and which urban pioneers inevitably associate with madness and loose bowels. Which, on this bus packed to the gills, explained the empty seat beside him.
I might have kept my distance, might have stared at him a while, remembering my old days by remembering his, then discreetly stepped off the bus at my appointed stop, put the whole business out of my mind until I returned to work the next morning, met Max Groom in the men’s room and said, Hey, Max, guess who was on the Crosstown 42 last night? Who? Vinnie Teague, that’s who, Irish Vinnie Teague, the Shameful Shamrock. Mother of God, he’s still alive? Well, in a manner of speaking.
And that might have been the end of it.
But it wasn’t.
You know why? Because, in a manner of speaking, I was also still alive. And what do the living owe each other, tell me this, if not to hear each other’s stories?
So I muscled through the crowd, elbowing my way toward the rear of the bus while Irish Vinnie continued to stare out into the fruitless night, his face even more motionless when looked upon close up, his eyes as still as billiard balls in an empty parlor.
The good news? No smell. Which left the question, Is he nuts?
Language is a sure test for sanity, so I said, “Hey there.”
Nothing.
“Hey.” This time with a small tap of my finger on his ragged shoulder.
Still nothing, so I upped the ante. “Vinnie?”
A small light came on in the dull, dead eyes.
“Vinnie Teague?”
Something flickered, but distantly, cheerlessly, like a candle in an orphanage window.
“It’s you, right? Vinnie Teague?”
The pile of laundry rustled, and the dull, dead eyes drifted over to me.
Silence, but a faint nod.
“I’m Jack Burke. You wouldn’t know me, but years ago, I saw you at the Garden.”
The truth was I’d seen Irish Vinnie Teague, the Shameful Shamrock, quite a few times at the Garden. I’d seen him first as a light heavyweight, then later, after he’d bulked up just enough to tip the scales as a heavyweight contender.
He’d had the pug face common to boxers who’d come up through the old neighborhood, first learned that they could fight not in gyms or after-school programs, but in barrooms and on factory floors, the blood of their first opponents soaked up by sawdust or metal shavings in places where no one got saved by the bell.
It was Spiro Melinas who’d first spotted Vinnie. Spiro had been an old man even then, bent in frame and squirrelly upstairs, a guy who dipped the tip of his cigar in tomato juice, which, he said, made smoking more healthy. Spiro had been a low-watt fight manager who booked tumbledown arenas along the Jersey Shore, or among the rusting industrial towns of Connecticut and Massachusetts. He’d lurked among the fishing boats that rocked in the oily marinas of Fall River and New Bedford, and had even been spotted as far north as coastal Maine, checking out the fish gutters who manned the canneries there, looking for speed and muscle among the flashing knives.
But Spiro hadn’t found Vinnie Teague in any of the places that he’d looked for potential boxers during the preceding five years. Not in Maine or Connecticut or New Jersey. Not in a barroom or a shoe factory or a freezing cold New England fishery. No, Vinnie had been right under Spiro’s nose the whole time, a shadowy denizen of darkest Brooklyn who, at the moment of discovery, had just tossed a guy out the swinging doors of a women’s shelter on Flatbush. The guy had gotten up, rushed Vinnie, then found himself staggering backward under a blinding hail of lefts and rights, his head popping back with each one, face turning to pulp one lightning fast blow at a time, though it had been clear to Spiro that during all that terrible rain of blows, Vinnie Teague had been holding back. “Jesus Christ, if Vinnie hadn’t been pulling his punches,” he later told Salmon Weiss, “he’d have killed the poor bastard with two rights and a left.” A shake of the head, Spiro’s eyes fixed in dark wonderment. “I’m telling you, Salmon, just slapping him around, you might say Vinnie was, and the other guy looked like he’d done twelve rounds with a metal fan.”
Needless to say, it was love at first sight.
And so for the next two years Spiro mothered Vinnie as if he were a baby chick. He paid the rent and bought the groceries so Vinnie could quit his prestigious job as a bouncer at the women’s shelter. He paid for Vinnie’s training, Vinnie’s clothes, Vinnie’s birthday cake from Carvel, an occasion at which I was present, my first view of Irish Vinnie Teague. He was chewing a slab of ice cream cake while Spiro looked on, beaming. Snap. Flash. Page 8 over the lead line, up-and-comer breaks training on his 24TH.
He’d continued upward for the next four years, muscling his way higher and higher in the rankings until, at just the moment that he came in striking distance of the title, Irish Vinnie had thrown a fight.
There are fixes and there are fixes, but Irish Vinnie’s fix was the most famous of them all.
Why?
Because it was the most transparent. Jake La Motta was Laurence Olivier compared to Vinnie. Jake was at the top of the Actors Studio, a recruiting poster for the Strasburg Method, the most brilliant student Stella Adler ever had . . . compared to Vinnie. Jake LaMotta took a dive, but Irish Vinnie took a swan dive, a dive so obvious, so awkward and beyond credulity, that for the first and only time in the history of the dive, the fans themselves started swinging, not just booing and waving their fists in the air, not just throwing chairs into the ring, but actually surging forward like a mob to get Vinnie Teague and tear his lying hea
rt out.
Thirty-seven people went to Saint Vincent’s that night, six of them cops who, against all odds, managed to hustle Vinnie out of the ring (from which he’d leaped up with surprising agility) and down into the concrete bowels of the Garden where he sat, secreted in a broom closet, for more than an hour while all hell broke loose upstairs. Final tab, as reported by the Daily News, eighty-six thousand dollars in repairs. And, of course, there were lawsuits for everything under the sun so that by the end of the affair, Vinnie’s dive, regardless of what he’d been paid for it, had turned out to be the most costly in boxing history
It was the end of Vinnie’s career, of course, the last time he would ever fight anywhere for a purse. Nothing needed to be proven. The Daily News dubbed him the “Shameful Shamrock” and there were no more offers from promoters. Spiro cut him loose and without further ado Vinnie sank into the dark waters, falling as hard and as low as he had on that fateful night when Douggie Burns, by then little more than a bleeding slab of beef, managed to lift his paw and tap Vinnie on the cheek, in response to which the “Edwin Booth of Boxers,” another Daily News sobriquet, hit the mat like a safe dropped from the Garden ceiling. After that, no more crowds ever cheered for Vinnie Teague, nor so much as wondered where he might have gone.
But now, suddenly, he was before me once again, Irish Vinnie, the Shameful Shamrock, huddled at the back of the Crosstown 42, a breathing pile of rags.
“Vinnie Teague. Am I right? You’re Vinnie Teague?”
Nothing from his mouth, but recognition in his eyes, a sense, nothing more, that he was not denying it.
“I was at your twenty-fourth birthday party,” I told him, as if that were the moment in his life I most remembered, rather than his infamous collapse. “There was a picture in the News. You with a piece of Carvel. I took that picture.”
A nod.
“Whatever happened to Spiro Melinas?”
He kept his eyes on the street beyond the window, the traffic still impossibly stalled, angry motorists leaning on their horns. For a time he remained silent, then a small, whispery voice emerged from the ancient, battered face. “Dead.”
“Oh yeah? Sorry to hear it.”
A blast of wind hit the side of the bus, slamming a wave of snow against the window, and at the sound of it Irish Vinnie hunched a bit, drawing his shoulders in like a fighter . . . still like a fighter.
“And you, Vinnie. How you been?”
Vinnie shrugged as if to say that he was doing as well as could be expected of a ragged, washed-up fighter who’d taken the world’s most famous dive.
The bus inched forward, but only enough to set the strap-hangers weaving slightly, then stopped dead again.
“You were good, you know,” I said quietly. “You were really good, Vinnie. That time with Chico Perez. What was that? Three rounds? Hell, there was nothing left of him.”
Vinnie nodded. “Nothing left,” he repeated.
“And Harry Sermak. Two rounds, right?”
A nod.
The fact is, Irish Vinnie had never lost a single fight before Douggie Burns stroked his chin in the final round on that historic night at the Garden. But more than that, he had won decisively, almost always in a knockout, almost always before the tenth round, and usually with a single, devastating blow that reminded people of Marciano except that Vinnie’s had seemed to deliver an even more deadly killer punch. Like Brando, the better actor, once said, he “coulda been a contendah.”
In fact he had been a contender, a very serious contender, which had always made his downfall even more mysterious to me. What could it have been worth? How much must Vinnie have been offered to take such a devastating dive? It was a riddle that only deepened the longer I pondered his current destitution. Whatever deal Spiro Melinas had made for Vinnie, whatever cash may have ended up in some obscure bank account, it hadn’t lasted very long. Which brought me finally to the issue at hand.
“Too bad about . . .” I hesitated just long enough to wonder about my safety, then stepped into the ring and touched my gloves to Vinnie’s. “About. . . that last fight.”
“Yeah,” Vinnie said, then turned back toward the window as if it were the safe corner now, his head lolling back slightly as the bus staggered forward, wheezed, then ground to a halt again.
“The thing is, I never could figure it out,” I added.
Which was a damn lie since you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to come up with the elements that make up a fix. It’s money or fear on the fighter’s side, just money on the fixer’s.
So it was a feint, my remark about not being able to figure out what happened when Douggie Burns’s glove kissed Vinnie’s cheek, and the Shameful Shamrock dropped to the mat like a dead horse, just a tactic I’d learned in business, that if you want to win the confidence of the incompetent, pretend to admire their competence. In Vinnie’s case, it was a doubt I offered him, the idea that alone in the universe I was the one poor sap who wasn’t quite sure why he’d taken the world’s most famous dive.
But in this case it didn’t work. Vinnie remained motionless, his eyes still trained on the window, following nothing of what went on beyond the glass, but clearly disinclined to have me take up any more of his precious time.
Which only revved the engine in me. “So, anybody else ever told you that?” I asked. “Having a doubt, I mean.”
Vinnie’s right shoulder lifted slightly, then fell again. Beyond that, nothing.
“The thing I could never figure is, what would have been worth it, you know? To you, I mean. Even, say, a hundred grand. Even that would have been chump change compared to where you were headed.”
Vinnie shifted slightly, and the fingers of his right hand curled into a fist, a movement I registered with appropriate trepidation.
“And to lose that fight,” I said. “Against Douggie Burns. He was over the hill already. Beaten to a pulp in that battle with Chester Link. To lose a fight with a real contender, that’s one thing. But losing one to a beat-up old palooka like —”
Vinnie suddenly whirled around, his eyes flaring. “He was a stand-up guy, Douggie Burns.”
“A stand-up guy?” I asked. “You knew Douggie?”
“I knew he was a stand-up guy.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Meaning what?”
“That he was an honest guy,” Vinnie said. “A stand-up guy, like I said.”
“Sure, okay,” I said. “But, excuse me, so what? He was a ghost. What, thirty-three, four? A dinosaur.” I released a short laugh. “That last fight of his, for example. With Chester Link. Jesus, the whipping he took.”
Something in Irish Vinnie’s face drew taut. “Bad thing,” he muttered.
“Slaughter of the Innocents, that’s what it was,” I said. “After the first round, I figured Burns would be on the mat within a minute of the second. You see it?”
Vinnie nodded.
“Then Douggie comes back and takes a trimming just as bad in the second,” I went on, still working to engage Irish Vinnie, or maybe just relive the sweetness of my own vanished youth, the days when I’d huddled at the ringside press table, chain-smoking Camels, with the bill of my hat turned up and a press card winking out of the band, a guy right out of Front Page, though even now it seemed amazingly real to me, my newspaperman act far closer to my true self than any role I’d played since then.
“Then the bell rings on Round Three and Chester windmills Douggie all over again. Jesus, he was punch-drunk by the time the bell rang at the end of it.” I grinned. “Headed for the wrong corner, remember? Ref had to grab him by the shoulders and turn the poor bleary bastard around.”
“A stand-up guy,” Vinnie repeated determinedly, though now only to himself.
“I was amazed the ref didn’t stop it,” I added. “People lost a bundle that night. Everybody was betting Douggie Burns wouldn’t finish the fight. I had a sawbuck said he wouldn’t see five.”
Vinnie’s eyes cut over to me. “Lotsa people lost money,” he muttered
. “Big people.”
Big people, I thought, remembering that the biggest of them had been standing ringside that night. None other than Salmon Weiss, the guy who managed Chester Link. Weiss was the sort of fight promoter who wore a cashmere overcoat and a white silk scarf, always had a black Caddie idling outside the arena with a leggy blonde in the back seat. He had a nose that had been more dream than reality before an East Side surgeon took up the knife, and when he spoke, it was always at you.
Get the picture? Anyway, that was Salmon Weiss, and everybody in or around the fight game knew exactly who he was. His private betting habits were another story, however, and I was surprised that a guy like Irish Vinnie, a pug in no way connected to Weiss, had a clue as to where the aforementioned Salmon put his money.
“You weren’t one of Weiss’s boys, were you?” I asked, though I knew full well that Vinnie had always been managed by Old Man Melinas.
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