You Are My Heart and Other Stories (22 page)

Which he was, and within less than two years he'd moved up from salesman, to head of sales, to full partner. By this time, he'd also married—Carol Schifrin, a very pretty lady who'd gone to Adelphi College and ran a travel agency with her parents—and they'd had a house built for them in Scarsdale they helped design. Although my mother and father didn't like to praise much connected with Herschel or Joey, they couldn't keep from being in awe at what they called the dream-come-true house and life Joey and Carol had. And on rare occasions my mother would accord Joey the highest compliment you could pay a guy in those days. “He's good to his parents—I have to give him that,” she'd say. “He's good to Rose and Herschel, and that goes a long way with me.”

We visited Joey for his Open House party in Scarsdale, and, since everyone I knew until then lived in small one or two bedroom apartments (I didn't have a single friend or relative who owned a private home), the house seemed incredible. It had four separate bathrooms (including one attached to the guest room), sky-lights in all the upstairs bedrooms, a landscaped backyard
with an in-ground swimming pool, and—my favorite part—a finished basement with a bar, a first-class stereo system, an enormous TV, and a workout room where, along with weights and barbells, there was a gym-quality heavy bag, a speed bag that hung down from the ceiling, and, the bag Herschel loved most of all, a free-standing
reflex
speed bag.

After school sometimes, I'd take the subway into Manhattan, to Eighth Avenue and West 38
^th
Street, to visit Joey, and no matter when I did, he'd stop work and tell his secretaries to hold his phone calls so he could show me around. The main factory floor was over a hundred feet long and about thirty to forty feet wide, with two long tables running its length on which there were bolts of cloth spread out flat and stacked high that the cutters worked on. Around three sides of the room were dozens of sewing machines where women—mostly Spanish, but with a few elderly Jewish ladies too—assembled and stitched together material that came from the cutting tables.

Joey's company manufactured sports shirts mostly, the kinds with little emblems on their breast pockets of animals—crocodiles (this was before Lacoste trademarked them), ducks, sharks, tigers, bears, lions—or sports stuff: baseballs, footballs, basketballs, tennis balls, tennis rackets, golf balls, golf clubs—and Joey would give me a tour of the place, introduce me to workers, tell me what they did, and praise them for how good they were at their jobs. He'd always ask which of his new line of shirts I liked best, and before I left he'd give me a box with three or four shirts packed up in white tissue paper.

When I was fifteen, and playing JV basketball at Erasmus, Joey came to some of my games, gave me pointers, mostly about passing and defense, which he called the dying arts of the game, and when the season was over, and I'd made it up to varsity for the last half-dozen games and the playoffs (we went to the quarterfinals of the city championship that year, and had two guys on our team, Doug Moe and Julie Cohen, who eventually wound
up being All-American college players), to celebrate my season, he and his father got permission from my mother to take me out to Lakewood for a weekend, where Joe Louis, well past his prime and in big trouble with ex-wives and back taxes (and drugs, we'd later learn), was training in the hopes of making another comeback, even though, while still champ, he'd already been badly shown up by Billy Conn and Jersey Joe Walcott, and, in his initial comeback attempts, had been badly beaten by Ezzard Charles and Rocky Marciano.

I'd been to the training camp twice before, but when I was much younger, and this time being there was a dream come true. I was able to go jogging with Joey, Herschel, and the fighters and trainers every morning—Louis too—and to spend my day in the gym, working out on the machines and watching the fighters spar. I ate my meals at the training tables with them, and it felt wonderful to see the way people still looked up to Herschel, and lapped up the stories he told about the way things had been in the fight game in what he called the golden olden days.

That year Joey had gotten Jackie Robinson to endorse a line of shirts—long-sleeve shirts with leopard skin patterns—and he'd brought a few boxes of the shirts with him, before they were put on sale in stores, and gave them out to everyone, including Louis, and they were a big hit. At night, after the fighters went to sleep, Herschel and the managers and trainers would reminisce and argue and drink until the early hours of the morning, when—their way of signalling it was time to hit the hay—one of them would tell the old story of Max Baer stumbling back to his corner when Dempsey was acting as one of his seconds, and telling Dempsey, “I see three of them.” “Hit the one in the middle,” Dempsey advised.

Although Herschel had never fought professionally, he'd been a top-flight amateur boxer, undefeated in twenty-six bouts, and he'd sparred with the best of them—Willie Pep, Barney Ross, Solly Krieger, even Kid Gavilan and ‘Sugar Ray' Robinson—and
he was an amazing storehouse of anecdotes and facts, especially about Jewish fighters. He could name them all—Ross, Leonard, Tendler, Attell, ‘Battling' Levinsky, ‘Slapsie Maxie' Rosenbloom, Lesnevich, and he loved to be able to point out, when people brought up Baer as the greatest of them all (Baer had killed two men in fights, including Frankie Campbell, the brother of the Brooklyn Dodgers' first baseman, ‘Dolph' Camilli), that even though Baer wore a Star of David on his trunks, he was less of a Jew than Jack Dempsey. Baer's paternal grandfather, a butcher, was
probably
Jewish, Herschel would say, but Dempsey's maternal grandmother, Rachel Solomon, was
truly
Jewish, and that made Dempsey a Jew in his book, and surely would have made him a Jew if he'd been living in Hitler's Germany.

What also surprised me was that most of the men, Louis included, had great respect for Max Schmeling, who'd been known as ‘Hitler's boxer,' and who'd beaten Louis for the world championship in their first fight, then lost to him in the first round of their famous rematch, but who, according to Herschel, had been ‘a real
mensch
' to Louis, and—Louis nodded agreement—was now helping him out financially in his battles with thugs from the Internal Revenue Service.

On our second day in Lakewood, Joey took me on a drive around the area—a first—just the two of us, and when we drove past a house that was up a long driveway, partway into the woods—a colonial style building that looked as if it had once been a classy hotel, but which clearly, starting with rusted cars in the front yard, had fallen on hard times—he told me that this was probably the house he was born in: one of the places where the women my mother helped out lived while they waited for their children to be born.

The house is surely gone by now, and that part of the world's been taken over by Jews, not only Chassidic Jews with their huge families, but modern Orthodox Jews, and middle-class Jews who prefer to own their own homes or condos near New York City rather than retire to assisted living places in Florida. Years later,
when Joey was drinking hard and deep in the soup one night, I asked him about the house, and about the women who lived in them—asked if he'd ever wanted to find out who his mother was—and he got a sudden wild-fire in his eyes, as if, had he been sober, he would have tried to kill me, and he said that say what you would, the women in those places were all sluts.

“Oh come on—!” I began, but he grabbed me by the front of my shirt. “Yeah, yeah—I know all about it,” he said, cutting me off, “the way you people think now—how the guys were dishonorable shits and didn't pay the price women did—but say what you will, they were all dirty sluts, my mother included.”

I was stunned by the venom in his voice, but when we were driving around the Lakewood area together that first time, I loved him so much I would never have dreamt he could have had such a vicious, unkind thought in his head. That was also the day he explained how it all worked: how when families of pregnant young women came to certain doctors—after they found out their lousy news and wanted to avoid the shame that would accompany an illegitimate birth—these doctors would tell them there was an alternative to the danger of abortion, and refer them to doctors like Margolies who were associated with lawyers who could guarantee that the women we now call ‘birth-mothers' would never know to which families their infants were given away. The lawyers also took care of whatever papers were needed—health forms, birth certificates—and dealt with financial arrangements, and with people in the Lakewood area who needed to be paid off for looking the other way. For this, Joey said, his father's connections with gambling big shots, many of whom vacationed in the Lakewood area and spent time at training camps like the one I went to with Joey and Herschel, had been helpful. He also said that no matter what my mother said about him, he never took offense because in his eyes she'd always be the most courageous woman he knew—that it was because of women like her that guys like him got a break in life.

On our third and last day at the camp, Herschel taped up
my hands, brought me headgear and gloves, and put me in the ring with a young professional fighter named Danny Mancuso, who was about my weight, maybe one-forty, and bet that even though I'd never been in a ring before, given how good an athlete I was, I could go three rounds with Mancuso without being knocked down. I looked to Joey, who gave me a big grin and said he was going to lay a hundred smackers on me against any and all takers.

Herschel took me aside, coached me on some basics—jab, jab, slip, slip—how, after I jabbed, to move my head quickly to the side to avoid a return blow—and said that the main thing was not the hands, but the legs. “Balance, Marty,” he said. “Make sure you got good balance, especially when you move from side to side—and when you see an opening and swing, maintain your balance—don't let your back leg drag, got it?”

I said I did, but when the bell rang and I stepped into the ring, my legs turned to jelly, and as Mancuso danced around and threw jabs—I was able to catch most of them with my gloves—and then laughed at me for being a pretty boy whose nose he'd try not to break, my stomach gurgled so loud I thought everyone would hear it.

Between rounds, Herschel told me I'd done a good job of keeping away from Mancuso's right hand, which he said was wicked. “He's just playing with you,” Herschel said, “and he got no clue that you're gonna surprise him.”

“I am?” I said.

“Oh yeah,” Herschel said, “because he's got the same problem Louis had with Schmeling in their first fight. When he goes for the knockout punch—a roundhouse right—he drops his left hand, which leaves him wide open. That's when you're in the money.”

My legs were better in the second round, and I enjoyed moving around the ring, and listening to Joey, Herschel, and some of the others cheering for me, and once in a while jabbing at
Mancuso and connecting, then getting him in a clinch so I could catch my breath. What surprised me, though, was how
tired
my arms got just from keeping them up all the time to protect myself.

“This is it, Marty,” Joey called when the bell rang for the third round. “So don't forget—my money's on you, and that there's nothing I hate more than losing.”

About a minute into the round I heard Mancuso's trainer yelling at him to stop fooling around and put me on my ass or they'd lose whatever bucks they'd put down against Joey. Mancuso came after me then, and I got up on the balls of my feet more, my knees slightly bent—as if I were guarding a guy who was trying to fake me out and make his move to the basket—and when he came at me with a couple of sharp jabs to soften me up, and I could tell he was going to unleash his right, I was ready, and just before he threw his right, he dropped his left the way Herschel said he would, and I laid into his stomach as hard as I could—as close to where Herschel had shown me the liver was, the most vulnerable spot on the body—and when Mancuso gagged and doubled over, I smashed him with a wild punch to the side of his head with all my might, then stepped away and, to my amazement, watched him fall flat onto the canvas.

Joey and Herschel howled with delight—roared out my name—and Mancuso stumbled to his feet, came at me again, but was too wobbly to land any good punches, and at the end of the round, Joey climbed into the ring, held my right hand high in triumph, and then walked around, his hand moving in and out between the ropes, to collect the money he'd won. “Come on, come on, guys,” he kept saying. “Pay up! Pay up!”

That night, after Joey passed out and two guys helped him back to our cabin, Herschel told me he was worried about Joey. “He saw a lot of shit when he was overseas,” Herschel said, “and he won't talk to nobody about it—just sucks it all in, and then drowns it in booze. So you keep an eye on him too, okay?”

I said I would, but what could I do, really? The more money he made, the more he drank, and having a loving wife and two gorgeous kids and everything money could buy didn't seem to make a difference. Sometimes, when I was home from college (I went to Union, a small upstate New York college where I was able to start on the basketball team by my junior year), and I stopped by his office, he'd take a bottle of Scotch and some paper cups from the bottom drawer in his desk and offer me a drink, and when I'd say no thanks, he'd tell me how smart I was, smarter than he'd ever be, and ask me what I thought he should do because he knew if he kept drinking the way he was, he'd wind up losing everything.

I said ordinary stuff—that he should talk to his doctor, or maybe go to one of the places movie stars and athletes went when they had to chill out—and he'd say that what I said made sense, and that he was going to think it over, and then he'd pour himself another drink.