The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  ‘Udders. Dugs,’ said Tess.

  ‘Water wings.’

  ‘And artistry my Aunt Fanny.’

  The Doyles, however they sang and danced, were more the willowy type. ‘Creatures of mist,’ said Aggie, ‘of gauze and gossamer.’

  ‘Flat as pancakes, she means,’ said Tess. And that, in turn, had meant Kalamazoo. For seven years, until Pearl Harbor, they’d toured the outback, living out of one shared suitcase. ‘Chickasha, Waxahachie, Kosciusko, Palmyra, North Platte,’ Aggie intoned, singsong as a railroad conductor. ‘Las Animas, Laredo, Jerk, Chatahoochee, Chincoteague, Eufaula, Cut ’n Shoot, Anaconda, Xenia, Uvalde, Alamogordo, Snowflake, Big Timber, Thermopolis, Calipatria, Calexico, McMinnville, Effingham, Crystal City, Tallulah, El Dorado, Eureka Springs.’

  ‘And Butte,’ said Tess.

  When the war came, it left them stranded in Gallup, New Mexico, with forty-two dollars and a Claddagh ring. They made their way to Phoenix, went to work in the factories, Rosie the Riveter and partner. It was the first time they’d stopped still since childhood. Within six months, they were both married; by D-Day, both divorced. Aggie had two sons, Tess a baby daughter, and they came East in the back of a lumber truck, direct from Durango, Colorado, to the Father Duffy statue, Times Square.

  When the truck set them down, it was late of an August night. The whole square was one solid mass of sweating flesh, parading and exulting, just showing off. The moment the sisters touched ground, two GIs swept them up, started dancing them in circles. ‘What happened? Did your horse come in?’ Aggie asked. ‘Our horse, damn right,’ her soldier shouted back. He looked about fifteen. ‘Our horse came in at last,’ he yelled, and then he yelled a lot more, only Aggie couldn’t pick up the words, the noise of the crowd drowned them out. So the soldier stopped shouting, just hugged her and whirled her around. Above their heads, the Times’s ticker tape was spooling, an unbroken ribbon of News. AXEMAN SLAYS THREE, it read, JAPAN SURRENDERS. The soldier fed Aggie Four Roses whiskey. SINATRA TO GO HOLLYWOOD. He kissed her lips, VICTORY, the ticker tape read, TAX HIKE IN WORKS.

  The Claddagh ring was long lost, but they had saved five hundred dollars, almost six. It was enough to stake them in a rooming house: ‘Liberties Hall,’ Aggie said, ‘catering to the Profession.’

  Off-Broadway, in those years, was full of such retreats. With vaudeville deceased and burlesque on life-support, the whole West Side overflowed with workless performers: ‘Acts at Rest,’ as Aggie called them. Their home housed tattooed ladies in distress, illustrated men, blackface minstrels, talking dogs, and midgets that had had their day.

  All of this made for convivial company, but not much rent. The Doyles, who stipulated ‘No Ethiopians, No Houris,’ went broke inside a year. Escaping north to Inwood, an Irish conclave off Upper Broadway, they took a sweetshop and poste restante beneath a bookie’s office, and there at last they stuck.

  Now retired, they were left with few wants, only one complaint. ‘Time weighs,’ Aggie said, and she quoted Emerson’s Journals: ‘The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.’ Wiping the last ketchup from her whiskers, she gazed mournfully at its stain in her lace handkerchief, like Camille reviewing her poisoned lifeblood. ‘We find ourselves languid, inert,’ she sighed.

  ‘Bored spitless, she means,’ said Tess.

  That’s what had brought them downtown. Whenever the sweets of idleness grew too glutinous to stomach, they’d ride the Broadway Local, renew their struggles and triumphs. The lights might now be Japanese, the burlesque houses reduced to porn palaces, and Liberties Hall was a parking lot. Still, Times Square itself did not dim. ‘Baghdad on the Subway,’ O. Henry had called it. To the sisters Doyle, though, it was not so exotic by half. ‘Just our old neighborhood,’ said Tess. ‘The place.’

  ‘Where we.’

  ‘Come from.’

  Their visits were off-hand, unstructured. Sometimes they’d take in a second-run movie on the Deuce, sometimes sip Shirley Temples in the Marriott Marquis Skybar, and sometimes they’d just walk: ‘It does not import,’ Aggie said. ‘The air alone rejuvenates, revivifies.’

  ‘Stirs up the old tripes.’

  ‘The Pause That Refreshes.’

  ‘Great gas.’

  Back in Inwood, their lace-curtain neighbors shrieked in affected horror. To hear them squawk, you’d think a day-trip downtown was suicide guaranteed – ‘the hara-kiri or the kamikaze,’ said Tess. ‘One of them dead yellow things, anyway.’ But the sisters were not troubled. No bad behavior or gutter language could touch them. To them, Times Square remained inviolate, eternally stuck at August 14, 1945: ‘Not the best place,’ said Aggie.

  ‘The only place,’ said Tess.

  From underneath her long woollen skirts, a pair of well-scuffed sneakers peeked, green and orange with Mercury wings. Now outdoors, shaking off the air-conditioned stagnance of Nathan’s Famous, she breathed in deep, filled her lungs with fumes and May Day heat, the sweet aching filth of Times Square: ‘You want to know the secret?’ she asked, and when she received no answer, she told it anyway. ‘Don’t stop,’ said Tess.

  ‘Whatever you do,’ said Aggie.

  ‘Just don’t stop.’

  Around the corner and up the stairs, inside the Times Square Boxing Club, Emile Griffith laughed with his mouth wide open, his big jaw flashing gold. He was a man in middle age, short and stocky, in a knitted woollen cap. ‘Who stopped?’ he squealed. ‘I discontinued, was all.’

  Even that had come bitter hard. By the time he retired from the ring, in 1977, he had fought pro for twenty years, won and lost five world titles, waged over a hundred bouts and headlined more cards at Madison Square Garden ‘than any other man living, dead, or not.’

  As welterweight and middle, he had been the New York fighter of his time: ‘The last of the hometown heroes,’ Bert Sugar said, ‘from the age when the Garden was still the center of fistic creation, not an outskirt of Atlantic City.’

  When Emile Griffith turned pro, the Garden had meant Sugar Ray Robinson and Willie Pep, Rocky Graziano and Jake La Motta; by the time he quit, it meant Pedro Soto, Edwin Viruet, Diabolito Valdez. ‘The place turned into a microwave,’ Bert said. ‘Just take the flesh of one couldabeena contender, fatten it up on tomato cans, then shove it under the ringlights, and voila! Instant Pumpkin, served horizontal, on a bed of ripe Limburger.’

  Only Emile survived the curse. As welterweight and middle, he was never the most ballyhooed of warriors, nor the flashiest or most explosive, just the slickest, the most enduring, and Bert’s prose still purpled at his name: ‘In his prime,’ wrote the Hat, ‘he was a Y-shaped youngster with a pinch waist and shoulders big enough to support water buckets, with a sparkling style of fighting to match the sparkle that danced and played in his dark eyes.’

  ‘My biggest fight?’ Emile said now. ‘The most famous was Benny Paret. The third time.’ He laughed again, his eyes young in an aged face. ‘Right there,’ he said, ‘in the Garden.’

  It was not a fight that a man forgot. Griffith had come from St Thomas, Benny ‘Kid’ Paret from Cuba. Between them lay mutual loathing: ‘He never liked,’ said Emile, shrugging. ‘I didn’t like even more.’

  All of the epic ring rivalries were in some degree a rematch of Ariel/Caliban; the clash of elemental opposites. So with Griffith/Paret. The Kid was a gladiator, battle-hardened and austere, but Emile was a laughing boy. He worshipped his mother, his own body, and the power of mockery. Before he turned fighter, he had worked as a milliner, designed picture hats. And he approached the ring in the same spirit, as a mortal game, terminal but not serious. When Hurricane Carter once knocked him kicking, over and out in the first round, he welcomed the press to his dressing room, not with tears or alibis, but with a brisk chorus of Merry Christmas.

  For Paret, that was blasphemy. A dark and brooding man of primitive gods, he spoke littl
e English, did not say much in any language. His whole expression was in fighting. Fast and flashy, a natural mover, his style held a mirror to Griffith’s own. Their three battles were all flair and movement, swift hands and swifter reactions. Griffith won the first, Paret the second; the third, for Paret’s welterweight title, arrived on March 24, 1962.

  By that time, Paret’s hatred of Griffith had come to possess him. He was a warrior; he followed a warrior’s code. Griffith, by clowning, dishonored that code. He had no dignity, no sense of gravitas. When he should have glared, he only giggled, a girlish squeal that flayed Paret, pursued him everywhere, in the gym, at press conferences, down the echoing Garden corridors to his dressing room, till he could stand no more and snapped. ‘Maricón,’ he said. ‘You faggot.’

  He only wanted Griffith to stop laughing. And he succeeded. In the night, when they met in the ring, Emile did not crack one smile. He was knocked down early, took a beating. But, late in the twelfth round, he trapped Kid Paret in a corner and would not let him out. Normally, his right hand was for ornament. Now it turned into a jackhammer. Like John Henry driving steel, he drove Paret down in wedges. With his back jammed tight against the ringpost, the Kid could not duck or turn away, could not even fall. Perhaps a dozen, perhaps twenty blows blackjacked him. He tried to collapse, but the turnbuckle held him up. So the blows kept raining, and Paret kept sinking beneath them. His face did not change, showed no fear or pain, nothing, but he slowly slid down the ropes. At last he sank to his haunches. ‘He was dead when he hit the floor,’ Bert Sugar said. But it took him ten days to expire.

  Griffith did not say much. In the ring, when the fight was done, he just looked dazed. And afterwards, in his dressing room, he did not care to discuss the thing. ‘He took a gamble. He lost,’ Emile said. He pouted, he ducked his head. ‘Sometimes I get too excited,’ he said.

  Twenty-seven years on, he did not often think of that fight. The only reason he recalled it now was that some researcher was here from a Stuttgart TV station and kept on dredging it up. A glum and bespectacled sort, heavy on the literal, the German’s name was Horst, and his questions filled three foolscap sheets on a legal pad. ‘What it was? When Kid Paret he died?’ he inquired. ‘What was your exact feeling?’

  ‘“When do I get paid?”’ said Emile.

  The Times Square Boxing Club was a long, narrow chamber above a cut-price tuxedo store. It had used to be a movie studio specializing in X-rated loops. Stag classics like Porker’s Delight and Anal Dwarf had been created in this stark space. Now it sheltered the hard core of New York fistiana.

  Floor to ceiling, right behind the ring, there was a massive plate-glass window, thickly smeared with the grime of years, and at its foot, ranged in a row like a hung jury, sat managers and trainers, ex-fighters, cut men, shills. In season, they warmed their haunches on the hissing radiators, or they soaked up what pinched sunlight seeped through the blanketing murk. They watched, they watched, and then they watched. Sometimes Jimmy Glenn, who owned the gym, would do the rounds, collecting gym fees. Like pigeons disturbed, the watchers would go through the motions of rising and dispersing. Then they’d settle back, untouched, and watch some more.

  It was an august and hushed gathering. No ritual on earth was more solemn than the schooling of prizefighters, and the Times Square was the Game at its most austere. The walls were papered with posters of champion alumni – Duran and Tyson, Boom Boom Mancini, Edwin Rosario, Rocky Lockridge. Beneath their blinkless gaze, present hopefuls skipped rope and worked the speedbags, shadowboxed, sparred. The shuffle of their feet and the slap of gloves, the hissing and grunting of breath, were the only sounds allowed. From the window, the old men watched, shook their heads. Only Emile Griffith made noise. His high girl’s voice careened off the boards and canvas and the smeared glass like a trapped bird, and he laughed and laughed. ‘My feeling? Exact?’ he cried. ‘When do I get paid?’ he said.

  The Y-shaped youth of the Kid Paret fights had been replaced by a pleasant plumptitude, its torso swathed in a patched sweater, bald pate concealed by a woollen cap. Pulled low, the cap cut off the face an inch above the eyebrows; from beneath, the sweater’s rolled neck devoured both throat and jowls. All that had survived, it seemed, were teeth and a bright pink tongue.

  The teeth flashed white and gold; the pink tongue darted. The eyes, still bright, tried dazzling. But Horst from Stuttgart was not to be distracted. ‘And afterward?’ he demanded.

  ‘After what?’

  ‘When you have been paid?’

  ‘I fought Ralph Dupas.’

  Dupas, said Emile, and Denny Moyer. He paused a moment in mid-giggle, cast back his mind. Denny Moyer, he said. Tacoma. Won ten. Scrappy kinda fight. He scratched an itch on his nose. Denny Moyer, he said. And Jose Stable, and Don Fullmer. With each name, he picked up a little speed, a bit more certainty, like a rusted caboose, long idled, getting shunted into service again. Don Fullmer, right, he said. Jorge Fernandez and Manny Gonzalez. And Luis Rodriguez. He rolled his shoulders, threw a feint. Rodriguez three times. He balled his right fist. Tough bastard, he said. One tough mother son. Between his Caribbean singsong and the giggling, it was not easy to keep pace. Names and places got tangled up, came out fractured. With each remembrance, the tempo increased, the lurch and piston-shudder. Soon the words and thoughts flew by in a wild blur, too fast to track. And the names. So many names. Dick Tiger. A warrior. And Nino Benvenuti. And Gypsy Joe Harris and Indian Red Lopez. And Stan Kitten Hayward. Slick, slick. Mantequilla Napoles. Smooth like butter. And Willie The Worm Monroe. Slippery like dogshit. Carlos Monzon twice, and Vito Antufermo. Caveman Lee. After the night with Paret, there were fifteen more years and eighty more fights, twenty-three in the Garden. Good nights. Big nights, Emile said. Whole lotta big nights. In Hamilton and New Orleans, in San Juan and St Thomas and Saratoga Springs. Holley Mims, won ten. A good boy, he said. Only I was better. With his sneaky fast left and his flapping right, with his great legs. Stan Harrington, Honolulu, won ten, he said. I put a good whipping in him. And his mother shrieking like a banshee from the box seats, three hundred pounds of womanhood, in floral hats and feathered hats, Lillie Langtry hats and Carmen Miranda hats. My mother, she is my sweetheart, I mean my own heart, he said. And Emile in red satin, Emile in leopardskin, Emile in solid gold, and Emile in virgin white. Gabe Terronez, Fresno, KO four. Don’t remember. The waist thickening with the years, the muscle-tone dulling, the punches he used to land solid just missing, the punches that used to slip by him just connecting. Nessim Cohen, Paris, draw ten. His hair gone, that was a good friend of mine. And his legs going too. My legs, he said. My bread and butter. Those were the legs I ate on. And still he fought on. Florentino Fernandez, some left hook, you feel you been hit by your own past life. And still there was that subliminal radar that never quite deserted him, kept pulling his chin back just a millimeter from that final right hand. Art Hernandez, Sioux Falls, won ten. Tony Licata, lost twelve. That punch that wouldn’t just fell him but kill him. Jean-Claude Bouttier, lost seven. But that doesn’t count. So he clutched and clinched; he stole points; he flurried. And even when he lost, he entertained. I was cute, he said. I always had the ring smarts. Right up to the very end. I was a good show. On his best night, and his last night. Alan Minter, London, lost fifteen. Out on his feet, but still standing. What you want to say? he asked. A fighter’s life, he replied.

  Now, in his years of leisure, he did some training, worked a few corners, a little this, bit of that. He tried to teach, pass on his own understanding. But what he knew, he could not put into words. And these young studs today, what the hell, they didn’t care to listen. They lacked the patience, the smarts. The ways things were, all that big TV money, two million for this fight, three million for the next, they did not wish to pay the price: ‘Just flybynights, flibberybibberies,’ said Emile. ‘And others.’

  ‘So what to do?’ Horst asked.

  ‘A man can laugh,’ said Emile. ‘Can’t he?’

  Jimmy Gle
nn had heard that one before. ‘It only hurts when I laugh,’ he said, ‘and I only laugh when it hurts.’ But he did not have time for either. When he was not running the gym, he was minding his bar, Jimmy’s Corner, on West Forty-fourth. It meant a twenty-hour day: ‘Make that twenty-one,’ Jimmy said.

  He was another of Bert Sugar’s heroes. ‘If Times Square had a soul, he’d be it,’ said the Hat.

  ‘Soul don’t pay the rent,’ said Jimmy Glenn.

  He was built big as a down lineman, a sleeping bear. Left in peace, he was benign. But it did not do to push him. Under threat, every pound of him hardened. Don’t Mess with Jim, the message flashed. And no one did.

  Still, strength did not buy rest. Every morning he climbed out of bed and into his clothes in his sleep; ate breakfast and caught the subway, read the paper in his sleep. Sleeping, he opened up the gym. Sleeping, he checked the equipment, ran through the accounts, thought about washing the windows. At the fifth cup of coffee, he roused himself sufficiently to throw a few bums out and let a few more in, shoot the shit before it shot him. Sometime in the afternoon, he’d somnambulate the two blocks to Jimmy’s Corner. In the back room, he collapsed into a decomposing armchair, allowed himself to drift. Only rest never came. A drunk started shrieking, or a woman began to weep. ‘Somebody need something,’ he said. ‘Somebody always does.’

  After ten years on this treadmill, his eyes stayed permanently ajar. Great purpled circles like bone bruises surrounded them, giving him the look of a jet-lagged panda. All about him, Times Square seethed and burbled, muggers pounced, psychotics ranted, and sirens screamed, but Jimmy neither saw nor heard: ‘Do not disturb,’ he said, ‘I got my living to earn.’

  This day, traveling from gym to bar, he was suddenly hit by a whirlpool of hot air. May had blown in on a sirocco. In one night, all trace of spring was expunged.

  Sweeping in off the Hudson, a parched wind whipped through Times Square like dragon’s breath, bearing trash and loose talk, Lush Life’s false eyelashes. Yellowed light backlit the crossroads like a movie set ripped apart by a dustbowl simoom. Everything not nailed down went whizzing past the ears. And with it went all restraints. Under Father Duffy’s statue, a gaggle of street urchins lay flat out on their backs, jeering and leering up dresses. Since most ladies hereabouts wore glitter-shorts or microskirts, the gesture was symbolic: ‘But apropos,’ said Lush Life, ‘in the context.’