Cinderella Man

by Marc Cerasini

  ROUND ELEVEN

  Who are the better judges, the public or the experts? I say the public.

  —Damon Runyon

  “Ready to face the jackals, Jim?”

  Joe Gould stood at the locker-room door. His hand clutched the knob, shoulder pressed against the wood as if he were holding back an angry mob armed with a battering ram.

  Braddock, slumped on a wooden bench, could hear the reporters jostling for position in the corridor outside. He was still clad in his trunks from the Lasky fight, robe tossed in the corner, towel draped around his neck. Before he replied, Jim gazed at his bruised hands, immersed in icy water to reduce the swelling. He opened and closed his fingers inside the galvanized steel bucket. Chunks of ice the size of bread loaves bobbed in the clear water.

  “Can’t hold ’em back forever,” Gould warned in the usual rasping half voice that came from his constant yelling in Jim’s corner.

  Braddock lifted his arms, shook his hands dry, used the towel to finish the job. “Ready,” he said. A corner man whisked the bucket out of sight. Jim rose and faced the door.

  Gould turned the knob and let go the flood. Flashbulbs popping, pens, pencils, and pads waving, the men of the fistic first estate burst into the locker room, filling it quickly, hurling questions—too fast and too many to answer, or even understand. Jim faced the group with a bemused smirk.

  Whenever Jim faced the press, he always thought of Dempsey vs. Firpo in 1923. In round one Dempsey had knocked down the Argentine heavyweight seven times, but before the bell clanged, the “Wild Bull of Pampas” fired off an enraged combination that drove Dempsey outside the ring, where his kisser connected with a writer’s typewriting machine.

  Dempsey got up at the count of nine and finally knocked Firpo out in the second round to retain the title. Nevertheless, after all the bad press Jim had gotten over the years, he figured he knew exactly what Dempsey’s head must have felt like smacking against that typewriter.

  “Was it an easy fight, Jim?” cried one reporter, loud enough to be heard above the clamor.

  Jim raised a bruised eyebrow. “Didn’t feel like one.”

  “Who do you think will be next, Jimmy?” cried another.

  Jim looked to Joe Gould, who gave a little shake of his head. Gould had confided the deal was as good as done, but it wasn’t Jim’s place to say it, so he shrugged. “Ask Jimmy Johnston.”

  “The smart money says Max Baer.”

  Jim crossed his arms. “You don’t say?”

  “Jim, Jim Braddock,” called Sporty Lewis, who’d pushed his way to the front of the pack. “Will you fight Max Schmeling in ’thirty-five?”

  “I would. But I hear Adolph Hitler wants Max to do his boxing in the Fatherland,” Jim replied. “Won’t even box Max Baer unless he crosses the pond.”

  “Yeah, like that’ll happen,” someone yelled.

  “Even Madcap Maxie isn’t that mad,” yelled another, producing a ripple of knowing laughter. Since Hitler came to power in Germany, East Coast promoters had been forcing Schmeling out of most venues, though Jimmy Johnston still yearned to pair Schmeling with a number of American fighters.

  “To what do you credit your victory over Lasky?” The man from the News waited for Jim’s reply, pen poised over paper.

  Jim thought for a moment. “I guess it’s having a great family. A great manager, a great trainer—”

  “And a great left!” Joe Gould croaked, punching air.

  “Yeah, that too,” said Jim.

  After that, most of the questions concerned Braddock’s future, questions he and Joe Gould both fended off, not wanting to tempt fate. After Jim offered the sportswriter for the Hudson Dispatch—the Union City paper—his own version of the Lasky fight, Joe yanked off his fawn fedora and waved the reporters out of the locker room.

  “Come on, let Braddock alone now, ya bums,” Gould insisted, pushing them out the door. “Jimmy’s got a wife and kids to go home to. Ain’t any of you guys family men?”

  A string of guffaws was the reply.

  “Nah,” muttered Gould, “didn’t think so…”

  “Good job, Jim. I knew you could do it. Won me a quarter. Twenty-five cents!”

  A rumpled suit hung from the little man’s frame. He had dirty gray hair and missing front teeth. But his expression was Christmas morning.

  Most of the fight fans had long since departed. The streets around the Garden were dark and desolate, but the moment Jim Braddock and Joe Gould had stepped out the door, a gang of fifty men closed around them.

  The scene was markedly different from the group who’d greeted him after his Tuffy Griffiths KO back in 1928. Gone were the flamboyantly dressed high rollers with diamond tiepins and new fedoras, the flappers with mink-trimmed coats, fringed dresses, and silk stockings. In their place stood a rough bunch of men in tattered work clothes and scuffed shoes. Worn and lean with hunger, their bodies had been stooped by disappointment, toil, and want—yet when they saw Braddock emerge, they straightened. Defeated faces were resurrected, weariness turned to hope.

  Jim was stunned by the sight. At his shoulder, Joe Gould grinned and croaked, “You sign a few, leave them wanting.”

  Braddock shook his head. “Nah, Joe…You sign them all.”

  Callused hands with broken fingernails waved press books, newspaper clippings, even betting sheets at the fighter. Jim moved among them, shaking hands and scribbling his name on whatever scrap was thrust upon him. He signed and talked and joked and shook hands until the crowd dispersed, over an hour later.

  “Did I leave them wanting?” he asked, wandering over to Joe Gould. The manager had long ago sat down on some nearby steps to wait for his fighter.

  “You sure did,” Gould replied, dusting off his fawn coat. “So we gonna hit the spots.”

  “Home, Joe.”

  Jim was quiet for most of the drive, so Joe did most of the talking. He recounted the fight in his own colorful way twice when his roadster rolled up to the curb in front of Braddock’s tenement building. The motor was still running when Jim opened the door. “Good night, Joe.”

  “Hey, aren’t you forgetting something? Your cut of the purse.” Gould reached into his coat, produced a thick wad of bills. The manager began to count out the cash and explain the breakdown of expenditures. Jim lifted his bruised hand to silence him.

  “I trust you, Joe. You know that. And so does Mae.”

  Gould smiled and thrust the cash into Braddock’s hand. Jim glanced down at the small fortune, then thrust it into his coat. “I’d invite you in, but it’s late,” said Jim. “The kids are asleep.”

  Gould opened his mouth to speak, then realized no words were necessary. He waved good-bye, threw the roadster into gear and peeled off down the street, kicking up soot and discarded newspapers like the March winds.

  Before Jim entered his tiny apartment, he paused under a naked bulb in the hallway and counted the cash. His aim was to divide the money into two neat piles. When he entered the apartment, he placed one bundle in the mason jar Mae still used for a bank. The other he tucked into a wrinkled envelope he’d been holding on to for what seemed like an eternity.

  Mae and the children were asleep, and he was careful not to wake them. He’d tell them all about his victory over Art Lasky tomorrow. Jim undressed, folding his clothes and draping them over a chair, then slipping between the clean white sheets. Beside him, Mae shifted on the mattress. He gazed at her until he nodded off, but he didn’t sleep long. When the first rays of the chilly March dawn streamed through the window, he rose and hurriedly dressed, managing to slip out before Mae and the children stirred.

  The windswept sidewalks were empty. He strode toward the center of town along sidewalks damp from an overnight shower. As Jim crossed the square and approached the Newark courthouse, pedestrian traffic increased. Inside the relief office, it was warm. Braddock joined the men and women already standing on line. As he waited patiently for service, several people seemed to recognize him. One man sh
owed a local paper to the fellow at his shoulder. Inside, a three-column article, complete with grainy photograph snapped in Braddock’s locker room right after the bout, outlined Jim’s surprising victory at the Garden.

  Waiting patiently, hands folded in front of him as he wended his way slowly to the front of the line, Jim ignored the curious, sidelong glances. When it was finally his turn, he stepped up to the counter and greeted the now familiar woman with a nod. He drew the official white envelope, which bore the seal of the State of New Jersey, out of his pocket, slid it across the counter. The woman picked it up, peeked inside.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said, displaying the cash. “You want to give the money back?”

  Jim purchased a dozen long-stem roses from a florist on his way home—a wildly extravagant gesture, but his way of apologizing to Mae for not waking her the night before, or this morning, to tell her about the fight. He knew his wife would be upset about that, but Jim hadn’t wanted to celebrate his victory over Lasky—or even acknowledge it—until he returned all the money the relief office had given his family over the last few months. Now that the weight of that shame had been lifted, Jim felt a hundred pounds lighter. The aches and pains from the fight were forgotten and his steps were buoyant as he opened the door to his family’s apartment.

  His smile dissolved when he found Sara Wilson there, sitting on their old sofa, her eyes red-rimmed from crying, the baby girl in her arms racked with a hacking cough. Mae looked up when he entered, pale face somber. “Mike’s gone missing,” she told him softly.

  Jim crossed the room. He dropped the flowers onto the table, spying Jay, Howard, and Rosy huddled in a corner where Mae had banished them, straining hard to hear what was going on.

  He crouched down in front of Sara, placed his hands on her shoulders. “How long?”

  “Three days,” Sara cried. “I’ve been staying at my brother’s since Jake cut him—”

  “Jake cut him?” Braddock gulped. That was bad news. The docks provided the only reasonably steady work around, but not if Jake the foreman didn’t pick you out of the pack of hopefuls. “When?”

  Sara wiped her eyes with a dirty cloth. “Maybe a week after you left the docks for good. You know how Mike gets. All his talk. So much trouble.”

  The baby coughed. Sara caressed the girl’s face as if she saw Mike there. “He’s been sleeping nights down in the Hooverville. My brother didn’t have room for both him and us.”

  She looked up at Jim. “He said he was doing some strategy work for you. He had a little cash coming in, down at the gym all the time. It made sense, you being friends and all…” Her voice trailed off. More tears dewed her eyes and Jim could tell Mae had already dashed this fantasy. “Last night, he was supposed to meet me down at Quincy’s,” Sara continued. “He never showed…” She clawed Jim’s sleeve with clutching fingers. “Something’s wrong, Jim. I know it. He’d never miss one of your fights. He just wouldn’t.”

  Jim looked down at her, surprised by this revelation. Then he faced his wife. Silently, she gestured toward the mason jar that contained his fight winnings—the family’s rainy-day money. Jim nodded. “Look,” he told Sara, gently pulling her hand from his arm, “you and Mae go down to Rexall, get something to fix her cough. I’ll go—”

  But Sara wasn’t listening, lost in a nightmare of her own. “I give up,” she said softly, staring into nothingness. “That’s what Mike said before he left last time. I should have known something was wrong. ‘I give up,’ he said.”

  Mae and Jim were startled by her words.

  “I’m sure he’s fine, Sara,” said Jim, trying to hide the lie. Mae touched the woman’s shoulder, a silent reinforcement. But Sara didn’t believe it, and she broke down. Her baby cried too, its tiny face flushing redder than a cutman’s rag.

  Two strides took Jim to the front door. “I’ll…I’ll just go round him up…”

  Braddock thrust a bill into the driver’s hand, stepped out of the cab. Sinking below the Manhattan skyline, the sun was a milky ball, casting its feeble rays through passing clouds over a barren expanse of trampled grass and tall, barely budding trees. But Braddock knew that the vast, mock wilderness of Central Park was not so empty as it seemed, that something beyond the chilly March wind stirred there.

  Since the crash of 1929, more than a hundred thousand New Yorkers had been evicted from their homes. Tens of thousands of them—many who once considered themselves middle class—were now living in their cars, in empty lots, subway tunnels, or on the street. By autumn 1930, the first shantytowns had sprung up along the banks of the East and Hudson Rivers. This Central Park “Hooverville”—named after the ineffectual chief executive who presided over the crash and its devastating aftermath—was the largest and most famous of these makeshift settlements.

  Among the ruins of the half-demolished Croton Reservoir in the middle of the park, men lived in water mains, storm drains, even in ditches they dug into the earth with their bare hands. The more skilled and industrious among them constructed rough huts or tents assembled from scraps of lumber, bits of canvas, plywood, cardboard—any material they could find.

  The denizens of this desperate shantytown lived on a subsistence level. They ate what they could buy, scrounge, beg, catch or steal. In time, no creature that inhabited the park with the starving masses was spared: Pigeons, squirrels, songbirds, and even rats were trapped and devoured daily.

  Jim had heard that most of the flocks of sheep who placidly grazed in the area of the park known as Sheep Meadow had been moved upstate by now, but, as he moved farther into the park, he realized a surreal evacuation was in progress. It appeared the last remaining few dozen or so sheep, who’d evaded the previous move, were now being herded out by groundskeepers into immense corral wagons lined up along a wide cobbled trail. Flanks twitching, steam billowing from their nostrils, the baying flock nearly trampled Braddock in their feral panic. One of the many cops on horseback, overseeing this process, whistled a warning and waved Braddock away with his nightstick.

  Jim moved away from the barnyard chaos, jogged down a gentle slope, descending at last into the jumble called Hooverville. As Braddock wended his way among ramshackle huts of cardboard, he heard moans and coughs from within, mingling with the constant howl of the March wind.

  Among the structures, shadows lengthened with the setting sun, the wavering glow of trash-can fires becoming the only source of light in the darkening park. Jim moved through legions of men, dressed in all manner of clothing from rags and tatters to soiled evening wear. They sprawled on old easy chairs that spit stuffing, ate at broken card tables, drank from vegetable cans or bottles.

  Jim warily approached an old man hunched over a roaring fire in an empty barrel—he was cooking something, though Braddock was not sure exactly what.

  “Excuse me.”

  The man turned, grinned wide enough to display missing teeth. Others emerged from the shadows of a leaning shanty. They eyed him, tipped their hats.

  “Evening sir,” said the taller. “Offer you a bite to eat? It’s fresh.”

  The cook used a stick in his hand to prod the food, carbonized fur hide cracked to reveal pink flesh. Juice sputtered into the fire. Another man reached forward, waving a bottle under Braddock’s nose. He smiled and waved the offer aside.

  “I’m looking for a friend of mine.” Jim glanced around. A sea of faces watched him, eyes shining in the half-light. “Is there someone in charge?”

  The man with the bottle chuckled, a deep, throaty sound. “Ain’t that the question of the day?”

  Jim heard the clop of hooves. Two policemen rode by, flanking a groundskeeper herding a small group of sheep. The men’s hungry eyes followed the woolly animals.

  Jim moved deeper into the park. The shanties seemed to go on forever, their rude construction a mirror in reverse of the tall, stately skyscrapers of glass and granite that ran up Fifth Avenue. Coming upon a tent, Braddock peered inside to discover a makeshift hospital. The a
ir stank of disease, and wet, tubercular coughs filled the dusk.

  “Mike! Mike Wilson?” he called.

  Sick, bleary eyes met his cry, but no reply, and Jim moved on. A man lay sprawled on the ground, his legs flung wide. Jim stepped over him and into the path of a pair of running policemen, who yelled for him to move. He turned to see where they were heading and saw a knot of mounted cops in the distance, a swarm of men around the horses’ legs. He smelled smoke, saw flames wafting up from a distant commotion. Shouts, howls, angry whinnies, and bleating sheep echoed across the lawn.

  Another cop charged by Jim on horseback, nearly trampling him. Pistol drawn, arm raised, the officer looked as if he were leading the charge up San Juan Hill. Jim followed the cop toward the chaos, but before he could get to its center, he slammed into a mob, a solid wall of bodies.

  “Mike Wilson!”

  The tide ebbed and flowed. Braddock was swallowed up by the press of men. Smoke from the burning shanty in the distance blew over the mob in a dim, choking cloud. Finally, he broke free.

  “Mike…Mike!”

  “Jim…Over here.”

  Braddock turned expectantly, but the man who’d called his name wasn’t Mike—just another inhabitant of Hooverville, a once prosperous man now trapped in financial limbo. “Braddock, right? Seen you fight.”

  Jim looked beyond the man, searching the milling throng, forced to blink against the poisonous fog.

  “Frank Gibson. City National,” the man said. “Hope you don’t want a loan.”

  Braddock pushed past him, across sere grass. He dodged a wild-eyed unfortunate with blood streaming from his head, and finally arrived at the center of what had been a riot: the Sheep Meadow.

  Horses and men had clashed together here just minutes earlier. Police, on foot and horseback, had regained control and were now herding the men like sheep, away from the overturned wagons. Someone had set a shanty on fire and the yellow flames were throwing flickering light on moaning men who’d been struck down by nightsticks and were now dotting the ravaged lawn.