The basement had bare concrete floor. bare plywood walls. Ceiling beams lay exposed. Pipes showed here and wires there. Storage cartons rimmed the perimeter, reliquaries for the bones of books Shemp’d authored. Dust a more likely outcome than university archive.
You know what this place needs? He stepped back from stationary bike and three rounds heavy bag. Fight posters. From Philly. From the ‘50s and ‘60s. When he and Pedro Orloff and Harvey Hertz and Richie Litvak had run, Arena to Blue Horizon to Convention Hall to Cambria Blood Pit. Never ones to throw a punch themselves for sport or money, but watching, rooting, riding the roar beyond the everyday. All three now gone. From pills and cancer and MVA. His own heart once stopped. His chest sawed open and restored “self” dropped into this drill of “health,” thirty-minutes a day, six-days a week, forever – or until.
The bag? Anything that doesn’t hit back, his cardiologist said.
Survivor.
xxx
He e-mailed J. Russell Peltz.
“Kid” Peltz, as he had been known for his knowledge of the Sweet Science at Camp Sun Mountain, whose teams had beaten Shemp’s in everything, had graduated Lower Merion a couple years after Shemp West Philly. Peltz had been the Quaker City’s boxing impresario for half-a-century, one of those rare youths to follow a passion into adult success, defying what uncles or frat brothers thought and counseled. Like that Barry or Larry who’d bopped into the Hi-Ho one night, excited because The Miracles’ Greatest Hits was out. Geez, Barry or Larry, Shemp’d thought, okay, “Shop Around,” “Bad Girl”; but grow up. That guy’d become the East Coast’s virtual Bill Graham. When Shemp’d wondered why the posters in the gym in Ray Donovan were from Philly, not L.A., he’d learned the source was Peltz.
He had exactly what Shemp wanted – if he’d go 2000-percent over budget. Which did not knock him off his pins entirely. He’d learned collectibles when he’d hunted the comics he’d coveted as a child and found they no longer cost a dime. Then he’d offered $5, $10 per. Sometimes dealers said, “Yes,” sometimes “No” – and sometimes, weeks later, raised their prices. “Is Paul Newman worth $10 million a picture?” someone once asked William Goldman. “He is if someone will pay it,” Goldman’d answered. Econ 1a, Shemp thought, had escaped these dealers. Peltz said he could do more recent posters for what Shemp had in mind. The only billed name he recognized was if the fellow was the grandson of a fighter he knew.
“Great,” he said.
Peltz said he’d throw in a couple extra. And since he and his wife were driving to Boca for the winter, he’d pack and ship them once the check arrived, so’s Shemp wouldn’t have to wait for their return to Philly.
That was so nice. It was nice too how quickly Peltz answered each of his half-dozen e-mails. Like he had nothing better to do than correspond with a nickle-dime pisher he didn’t know from Joe Palooka.
xxx
Things were looking up all over.
Trump was hanging on to office by the leprous skin of his rotted rat teeth. A COVID vaccine was so near people would be scrabbling up faked diseases to jump the line, like it was a draft to join, not dodge. Berkeley had been without a Red Flag fire warning for weeks. Ash no longer clotted the lungs he toted up and down its hills, shadow boxing the blossoms that overhung his path. He would have Philadelphia around him, though not yet the gladiators who had given blood and brain cells to enthrall and elevate him.
John DiSanto, though a South Jersey guy, ran phillyboxing history.com., hosted an annual awards dinner for its fistic community, and pushed city fathers for statues honoring home grown talent not named “Rocky.” Shemp knew him from his Gravestone Project, where donations for a marker for a local pug who’d died broke got you an 8 ½” X 11,” black-and-white glossy of your choosing. He already had Lenny Matthews and Charley Scott, so why not George Benton, Bennie Briscoe, Von Clay, Gypsy Joe Harris, Sugar Hart, Slim Jim Robinson? Some had made it to the Garden; none had worn a crown. Instead diabetes, pneumonia, Parkinson’s, strokes, blindness, brain damage, a bullet in the spine, a fatal heart attack at 44 had stalked them. “Sometimes,” an old woman in a madhouse toward the end of Suttree wonders, “I don’t know what people’s lives are for.” All would have eyes on him and his would be on theirs, his past accompanying his present as he followed doctor’s orders into the future.
DiSanto, remembering Shemp’s donations, offered a discount.
He didn’t have to.
Like Peltz didn’t.
The kindnesses touched him.
xxx
He lay, head on pillow, listening to his body improvise, free jazz. Stomach gurgle; foot twitch; cheek sting; ankle ache; ears itch; breath catch; nose dribble. He had heard that boxers were often sweet souls. The last one he had met, on a bench at cardio-rehab, Lou Smith, a sparring partnership with Larry Holmes documented by an iPhone photo, shoulder to shoulders with the Easton Assassin, had counseled turn a side to reduce the odds of an opponent nailing a vital organ. In his Philly days, Smith said, everyone carried gloves in his car trunk and, if a beef arose, laced up right there. Shemp’d Googled and Sweet Lou’d been 8-12 lifetime, so maybe. Also turn, he’d advised, if someone’s shooting at you. Now it seemed niceness overflowed the ring.
He had written in-house for corporate mags, where, masked in polite, professionalism, officers lied in service of utter evil. He’d had agents and editors land on him like rudeness and deceit were bricks from which careers were built. That morning, after his Adult Ed lecture, a first-novelist had asked for a referral to “an emotional support group to deal with rejections and other discouraging issues.” Boy, hon, he’d thought, are you in the wrong business. You want support; walk into my café. It’s like part of the fun of being a writer was bitching about how unfairly you are being treated and the worthless scum advancing ahead of you. The next questioner sought connection to Harlequin Romance.
Outside, sirens wailed – ascending, descending, ascending, descending – nearing him, then passing on. First thing each morning, Carl Reiner’d joked, he checked the obits; if he didn’t see his name, he got out of bed. Now that he had solved the walls, he could work on piping in cigar smoke.
Live dangerously.
Note
[1]. Faithful readers may wonder why they don’t meet “I” or “Goshkin” here. Believe me, I tried; but neither seemed to work. I was ambivalent about this new fellow’s name, until I learned that Shmuel (“Sam”) Horwitz, who bore it proudly through 70-some Three Stooges movies, died from a heart attack in a taxicab, following a boxing match at Hollywood Legion Stadium.
God spoke to me through Wikipedia.