The Telephone Booth Indian Read online

  The Count had a number of other disappointments. He saw a classified advertisement inserted in a newspaper by a man who said he wanted to buy cockroaches in quantity. The Count knew where he could buy some large tropical roaches which had been a feature of a recently raided speakeasy called La Cucaracha, where the customers could race roaches along the bar, instead of rolling dice, to see who would pay for their drinks. In his enthusiasm, the Count bought five hundred cucarachas, at a nickel apiece, from the prohibition agents who had raided the place. The Count knew some newspaper reporters from the days when he had exploited murderesses and boxing girls, so he called several of them up and told them of the big deal he had on the fire. They thought it was funny, and the story was published in the early editions of a couple of afternoon papers. The advertiser, however, did not want racing cockroaches. He wanted to feed the roaches to tropical birds, and the Count's acquisitions could have eaten the birds. Ordinary household roaches, obtainable from small boys in tenement neighborhoods at low cost, were better for the aviarist's purpose. The Count was stuck with five hundred hungry bugs. He turned them loose on the third floor of the Jollity Building and left for Florida with what remained of Boatrace Harry's money. Barney attributes the unusual size of the bugs in the Jollity Building today to the thoroughbred outcross.

  Morty was naturally quite angry with the Count at first, but after a few weeks began to miss him. “You have to hand it to him. He had a good idea all the same,” Morty says now. “The story about the roaches was in all the papers, and with that kind of publicity he could have gone far. A week after he left, a guy called up and asked for Mr. Bimberg. I asked him what did he want, and he said he had read about Public Ballyhoo, Ltd., and he was in the market for some moths. So I told him, 'I haven't any moths, but if you'll come up here, I'll cut holes in your pants for nothing.' “

  The Count de Pennies must have convinced himself that he was a publicity man. When he reappeared in the Jollity Building after he had lost Boatrace Harry's money at Tropical Park, he got a job with a new night club as press agent. The place had one of those stages which roll out from under the bandstand before the floor show starts. The Count decided he could get a story in the newspapers by sending for the police emergency squad on the pretext that one of the show girls had been caught under the sliding stage. The policemen arrived, axes in hand, and refused to be deterred by the Count's statement that there was no longer any need of them because he had personally rescued the girl. “You know very well that poor little girl is still under there!” the sergeant in charge roared reproachfully, and the coppers hilariously chopped the stage to bits. The Count lost his job.

  What was perhaps the zenith of the Count's prosperity was reached during the brief life of the Lithaqua Mineral Water Company. Lithaqua was formed to exploit a spring on the land of a Lithuanian tobacco farmer in Connecticut. The water of the spring had a ghastly taste, and this induced the farmer to think it had therapeutic qualities. A druggist who was related to a murderess the Count had formerly managed organized a company to market the water. He gave the Count ten per cent of the common stock to act as director of publicity. The Count “sent out the wire,” as fellows in the Jollity Building sometimes say when they mean that a promoter has had a third party act as gobetween, to Johnny Attorney and Boatrace Harry. “Why be thick all your life?” he had his intermediary ask Johnny. “The Count has something big this time. If you will call it square for the few hundred he owes you, he will sell you ten per cent of the mineralwater company for exactly one grand.” The Count had the same offer made to Boatrace Harry, and he sold his ten per cent of the stock to each of them for one thousand dollars. He sold his share in the enterprise to five other men, too, and was just beginning to think he had better go to Florida again when a chemist for a consumers' research group discovered that seepage from the vats of a nearby dye works accounted for the bilious flavor of the tobacco farmer's water. This got the Count out of a difficult situation. Even Johnny and Boatrace could understand that ten per cent of a worthless business was not worth quarreling about.

  During this period of affluence, the Count lived in a hotel on West Fortyeighth Street. “There was even a private shower,” intimates recall solemnly when they evoke the glories of that era. The Count took to wearing cinnamoncolored suits with pointed lapels that flared from his waistline to an inch above his shoulders and trousers that began just below his breastbone. Every day he bet on every race at every track in the United States and Canada, and he invariably lost. Almost four weeks elapsed, Morty Ormont recalls with astonishment now, before the Count again had to borrow nickels to make telephone calls.

  The Dixie Melody Tours followed several promotions of an increasingly prosaic nature. “The tours was too legitimate for his character,” Hy Sky says sadly. “There was nobody left for him to promote, only the railroad. So he went ahead and promoted it. Maxwell C. Bimberg was too brilliant!” Morty Ormont is more realistic. “In every class of business there has got to be a champion,” he says. “The Count de Pennies was never no good to nobody, but he was the champion heel of the Jollity Building.”

  • Mrs. Braune's Prize Fighters •

  n times like these, the lodginghouse conducted by Mrs. Rosa Braune on West Ninetysecond Street, near Central Park, is a peaceful and comforting place. It is almost entirely inhabited by prize fighters, who are the most tranquil of athletes. Unlike baseball players and jockeys, fighters seldom have noisy arguments. Not fighting is their avocation. Mrs. Braune's house gives a city dweller the same soothing sense of continuity that the round of seasons is said to impart to peasants. There are always new fighters coming up, old ones going down, and recurrent technical problems to discuss. I hadn't been to see Mrs. Braune and her lodgers since midsummer of 1939, and, as the world had gone through a lot in the interim, I visited the house a few days ago with certain misgivings. Happily, I found everything serenely unchanged.

  Most of Mrs. Braune's lodgers are under the direction of Al Weill, a bulbous man who is the thriftiest and most industrious fight manager of the day. The two windows of his office—an indication that he is at least twice as opulent as any competitor— overlook the land of the Telephone Booth Indians, but he is too wise to stable his prize fighters in the vicinity. Fighters not in his charge occasionally stop at Mrs. Braune's house, but Mrs. Braune doesn't encourage them. Prize fighters are drawn inevitably to parks, and the Central Park reservoir, around which they can take their morning runs, makes the neighborhood especially popular with them. Weill has a family and a home of his own on the upper West Side; his viceroy at Mrs. Braune's is Charles Goldman, a trainer and an old friend of mine. Goldman is a brisk little man with a flattened nose and a thickened right ear. These add authority to his comments on professional subjects. He used to be a smart bantamweight and never lets any of his pupils forget it. Charlie opened the door and greeted me as soon as I had rung Mrs. Braune's bell. This was not strange, because he lives in the front parlor of the oldfashioned brownstone house. His wide windows are a strategic point from which he can see any fighter who comes home late at night or tries to bring a girl in with him. From them he can also check on the boys as they leave for their morning runs in the park.

  We shook hands, then Goldman yelled up the stairs for Mrs. Braune and took me into his room to wait for her. It is a big room, and there are three beds in it. A FrenchCanadian fighter named Dave, who is not under Weill's management but lives in the neighborhood, was sitting on one of them talking in French to a Weill featherweight named Spider. Goldman introduced me, and then Spider said, raptly, “Go on, Dave, talk more French.” “Spider don't understand him,” Goldman said seriously, “but he thinks it sounds pretty.” When Mrs. Braune came in a couple of minutes later, Dave stopped talking, because Mrs. Braune, a German Swiss, understands French and would not have liked what he was calling Spider. “It's better than double talk,” Dave said to me with a grin. The two boys went out, and as they were leaving, Goldman said, “Don't get into no c
rap games.” The house stands in a treeshaded block of almost identical brownstones, all with high stoops, and usually there is a crap game in progress on at least one of them. Goldman disapproves of crap games because they take a fighter's mind off business. Whenever one of the boys is arrested and fined two dollars for shooting crap, Goldman gloats over his misfortune.

  Mrs. Braune is about sixty years old and built like a large, soft cylinder with a diameter not greatly inferior to its axis. She has a pink face, sparse gray hair parted in the middle, and calm blue eyes. She is so much like the conventional idea of American motherhood that no fighter in his right mind would think of talking back to her. Mrs. Braune once ran a rooming house at 19 West Fiftysecond Street—an address which disappeared some years ago when the nextdoor neighbors, Jack and Charlie, bought the building and added it to their restaurant at No. 21. Her clients in that house included a Fifth Avenue jeweler who had a lot of girl friends and suffered from a complaint that Mrs. Braune calls “the gouch,” theatrical people, who were noisy and kept late hours, and a number of White Russian countesses, whom she calls in retrospect “the Countesses of HavingNothing.” The countesses were much the worst pay. Mrs. Braune prefers her present lodgers, who are in bed by ten o'clock except when they are professionally engaged. She is sure of getting the room rent from Weill's fighters, at least, because Al pays it and takes the money out of their earnings. He is always urging his boys to live frugally and put their money in the bank. They have a hard time obtaining a couple of dollars a week from him for spending money. He telephones at ten every evening to ask Mrs. Braune if the boys are all in their rooms. Sometimes she covers up for a fighter she thinks must be staying on at the movies for the end of a double feature, but she doesn't condone any really serious slip. Weill has fiveyear contracts with his boys, and if one of them won't behave, even for Mrs. Braune, Weill simply declines to make any matches for him. This means that the fighter must get some other kind of work, a prospect so displeasing that discipline at Mrs. Braune's is usually perfect.

  The one detail of Mrs. Braune's appearance that sets her apart from other landladies is a pair of miniature leather boxing gloves pinned high on her vast bosom. She likes to show them to visitors, for they have been autographed by Lou Ambers, twice lightweight champion of the world. Ambers, she explains, was her star lodger for years and was responsible for her entrance into the prizefight business. In 1935, before he became illustrious, Ambers asked her for a room. He was training for a fight and had no money in the meanwhile. Mrs. Braune let him run up a bill of seventy or eighty dollars, a proceeding so extraordinary that after the fight Ambers induced his manager, Weill, to put all his fighters in her house. Ambers knew it was a lucky house, because he had won the fight. The boys living at Mrs. Braune's won a long series of bouts, and Weill began to call it, grandiloquently, the House of Destiny. It is impossible to tell how much Mrs. Braune's motherly discipline contributed to the winning streak, but the manager was sure it had some effect. Besides, the house is clean, and Mrs. Braune's rentals have always been reasonable. Now, after six years of it, she says, she feels like an oldtimer in the fight game, and Goldman reports that once he even heard her telling a tall heavyweight how to “scrunch himself over so he wouldn't get hurted.”

  Weill practices a kind of pugilistic crop rotation. He has under his management fighters who are valuable properties now and others he thinks will be profitable in from one to four years. Fight people speak of a boy as being one or two or three years “away.” Weill even has one towering youngster who hasn't yet had a professional bout but is living at Mrs. Braune's while he learns his trade. A manager gets from thirtythree and a third to fifty per cent of a fighter's purses, which, in the case of Ambers or Arturo Godoy, another Weill property, runs into considerable money. Often, however, a fighter on the way up doesn't earn his keep, and then Weill has to carry him. Weill pays Mrs. Braune the fighter's room rent and gives him a weekly fivedollar meal ticket. The ticket is good for five dollars and fifty cents in trade at a Greek lunchroom on Columbus Avenue. This arrangement keeps the boy from overeating, Weill explains. He makes his bookings in an office in the Strand Building, on Duffy Square. Usually he keeps a fighter working in towns like New Haven, Utica, and Bridgeport until he seems ripe for a metropolitan career. The boys come back to the house on Ninetysecond Street after each bout.

  “I prefer fighters than any other kind of lodgers,” Mrs. Braune said to me. “They got such interesting careers, like opera singers, but they are not so mean.”

  “She is just like a mother to them boys,” Goldman said admiringly. “She presses their trunks for them, so they will look nice going into the ring, and sometimes when I tell a boy he is getting too fine, she fixes him a chicken dinner. They don't board here regularly, but she likes to cook for them now and then. A fighter can't stay down to weight all the time or he will work himself into t.b. Now and then he has got to slop in. Mrs. Braune is a restraining influence on them kids. They got too much energy.”

  A boy walked down the hall past the open door, and Goldman called him in to show me a sample of the student body. “This is Carl Dell, a welterweight,” Goldman said. “He spends all his time writing long letters to dolls.” “Charlie is always worrying about maybe I would have a good time,” Dell said before acknowledging the introduction. “He is always beefing.” Dell has a strong, rectangular head with the small eyes and closeset ears of a faun. Goldman, perhaps affected by some remote sculptural association, said, “Look at him. He has a head like an old Roman.” He said Dell had been a good amateur and had won thirtyseven straight fights after turning professional. He had lost a couple of decisions in recent months, but that was natural, as he had begun to meet good men. “It is a lot in how you match a fellow,” Goldman said, “but anyway, he is a great prospect.” “I beat a fellow out on the coast that they said was the champion of Mexico,” Dell said, “and when I was down in Cuba, I beat the champion of Cuba. That is two countries I am champion of already.” Dell is twentythree years old and is at least a year “away.” He told me he came from Oneonta, New York, and had spent three years in the CCC, a government enterprise which develops fine arms and shoulders. Then he had won a lot of prizes in amateur tournaments and finally turned professional. He said he had never had any kind of job except boxing.

  Goldman began talking to me about the importance of concentration in shadowboxing. Dell looked embarrassed, seeming to know that the little trainer was talking at him. Mrs. Braune just sat quietly, as if used to such seminars.

  “One of the most important things in training is shadowboxing,” Goldman said, getting into the middle of the floor and assuming a guard. “Most boys, now, when they are shadowboxing they are just going through the motions and thinking of some broad, maybe. Shadowboxing is like when the teacher gives you a word to take home and write out ten times, so you will know it. In the examination you only get one chance to spell the word. The best two moves I ever had come to me when I was shadowboxing, but I was not just going through the motions with a swelled head, thinking of some broad. I always used to have a move where I feinted a jab and stepped to the left to get away, and one day it come to me, 'Why not really jab when I step that way? If I hit, I am in position to throw a right, and if I miss, I got my right hand up anyway.' “ Goldman went to his left, jabbed, and threw a right. “Then the thought come to me,” he said, “ 'Why not throw a left hook for the body instead, and that will bring me in position for a right uppercut?' Now, when I straighten up with that uppercut the guy is going to cross me with a right, ain't he? Sure! He can't stop himself. So then, as I throw the uppercut, I duck to the left in one motion, see?” The little man moved his feet and swayed to his left. “And I come up under his right!” he exclaimed.

  Dell had been watching with the detached interest of a boy who has no talent for mathematics but must pass a required course in trigonometry. “Do you get it?” Goldman asked him, abandoning his pretense of talking to me. “Sure,” Dell said with
out enthusiasm, “but I guess I would rather just wear the guys down.” He went away, saying he had to write a letter to his girl.

  In addition to listening to Goldman's expositions of theory, routine for the prize fighters at Mrs. Braune's includes a long run around the reservoir early every morning and laboratory exercises at Stillman's Gymnasium on Eighth Avenue from noon until about three o'clock. At Stillman's, the fighters box against boys from other managers' strings, to avert possible upheavals in the Braune home. A boy who has had a hard workout is content to do nothing for the rest of the day, which is exactly what a trainer wants him to do.

  Mrs. Braune, who used to take a normal matronly pleasure in promoting marriages between young people, has come to feel differently about marriage now that she is interested in prize fighters. Most managers don't like fighters to get married. “One manager is enough,” they often say. Mrs. Braune concurs in this prejudice, because when the boys get married they stop living in rooming houses. Also, she takes a proprietary attitude toward any fighter who has lived in her house and she thinks that no young woman can give a pugilist proper care. Lou Ambers got married last year. He had lived in the rear parlor of Mrs. Braune's house for four years, remaining there even after he had become lightweight champion of the world and a great drawing card. The rear parlor has cooking arrangements, and a fellow named Skids Enright, an old shortorder cook from Herkimer, New York, Lou's home town, used to live with him and do the cooking. The fighter was never extravagant. After his marriage Ambers went to live in Herkimer. A few months later he was knocked out by a lightweight named Lew Jenkins, who was also married but had been in that condition long enough to develop a tolerance for it. Another Weill fighter, Joey Archibald, won the featherweight championship, got married, and then lost a decision to a bachelor from Baltimore. Archibald is not acutely missed at Mrs. Braune's, however. Because of his unbearable erudition, her other lodgers never felt close to him. “Do you know what Archibald said to me?” Ambers once asked Goldman. “He said 'equilibrium.' “ Goldman and Whitey Bimstein, Ambers' trainer, had a hard time restoring friendly relations. Arturo Godoy is also married, but Mrs. Braune feels that, being a South American, he can stand it.