Spooner (37 page)

And loved his public. The adoration was not a one-way street, at least, and his fans became his friends, and he often took
some miserable example of the human race under wing and set him up in business. As a heavyweight contender, he made money
suddenly and in huge amounts, and financed more bars, quarter horses, dojos, dancing halls, pool halls, churches and hardware
stores than he could keep track of, and if the money he lent never came back to him, which it did not, nothing about that
surprised him at all. To Stanley such was the nature of business and money, and nothing about it mattered to him anyway.

In spite of this monumental indifference to matters of finance, however, Stanley was regarded in the boxing world as
hungry
, a quality familiar among young fighters making their way up out of poverty. Stanley Faint was hungry another way, something
like the way you are hungry when you first step into the street after a month in the hospital, when you want to see and smell
and taste the world again all at once. There was no greediness about him, no hint of the meanness that usually went with being
hungry
, even in the ring, and in this way he was more like an old fighter than the young fighter he was, the old ones—most of them
anyway—having achieved a certain serenity that comes in life when there is nothing left to prove.

Which is all to say that Stanley was a complicated human being, and for that reason Spooner was a long time coming to understand
that he did not fight for complicated reasons. Oh, they talked it over, but it wasn’t about growing up without a father—like
Spooner’s father, Stanley’s had died early on—or some mystical awareness of who he was coming over him in the ring, nothing
like that at all. The reason Stanley fought was that it was easier than working for a living and so far it was what he did
best.

Even at this early stage of his career, Stanley had been hit quite a bit, although he’d never been tipped over. But even Spooner,
his greatest supporter, admitted that for a practitioner of the art of self-defense, Stanley had a curious indifference to
the subject of defense. Until now, he’d fought his fights in states like New Mexico and Oklahoma and Arkansas, against the
kind of fighters that came from places like that, which is to say fighters who couldn’t fight much, but were still big, rough,
scary-looking people with scars and missing teeth—no one whose usage you might correct in a barroom—and most of them were
low hitters and head-butters and not disinclined to use their thumbs and elbows, as fighters who can’t fight much often are.
Stanley did not hold bad sportsmanship against them though, understanding, as he put it, that we all do the best we can with
the tools we are given to work with. And he knocked them out, one after another, beginning with an eighteen-second, one-punch
dusting of a 280-pound Mexican oil rigger, for which Stanley and the Mexican made a hundred dollars each, and spent together
that night in a bar. But the opponents, like the money, were in some way beside the point.

The point was simply that Stanley woke up one day with an egg in his nest—an egg in his nest as opposed to a nest egg—and
determined to sit on it for as long as it took to hatch. This required a kind of faith that someone like Spooner, full of
self-doubt, both admired and could not begin to understand. It was in some way the underpinning of the friendship—Spooner
not only unsure of himself as a novelist, but at the bottom of things not even sure he was good enough to write a column for
the
Daily News
, and Stanley believing heart and soul that he was the next heavyweight champion of the world. It struck them both as humorous.

Previous to departing Texas, Stanley had signed a contract with a third-rank fight promoter who paid for his ticket north
and gave him a few hundred dollars a month toward living expenses. It wasn’t much of a contract, but from the beginning Stanley
signed contracts the way movie stars signed autographs, paying exactly that much attention to what was on the paper. He contemplated
no trouble when it was time to go another way, as they said in the business world, and smiled tolerantly at his pro bono lawyer’s
warning that the pen was mightier than the sword.

He settled in to a section of town with a depressed housing market, as he called it, and socialized at night in the local
clubs and ran for an hour or two in the morning and trained in the afternoon at Joe Frazier’s gym on North Broad Street, where
five or six world-ranked heavyweights were also in residence. Stanley was thrown in with these fighters from the first day,
and it is possible that in the history of the democracy no citizen has ever had his nose broken by so many different people
in one week. He ate dinner in those early days with cotton packed into his nostrils, and leaked blood as he ate, and occasionally
shot a blood-soaked ball of gauze across the table when he brayed, a terrifying noise to the uninitiated which, perhaps due
to Stanley’s peculiar wiring and social skills, did not always seem to fit the situation.

A month or two after he arrived, word made its way back to Texas that Stanley’s progress had slowed owing to his not being
able to breathe, and the promoter himself flew up to supervise his medical treatment, taking him to a friend in West Philadelphia
who happened to be a veterinarian—not the last time Stanley would be worked on by a vet—and who removed all the various pieces
of broken cartilage from his nose, filled the cavities with gauze, and had him back in the gym the next afternoon.

It was Stanley’s slant on the human condition that a visit to the veterinarian for a nose job was an amusement, and likewise
living in an apartment without heat or a lock on the front door was an amusement, as were the needles and syringes and scalded
spoons, ladies’ dainties, used condoms, etc. that he sometimes found in and around his kitchen sink. It was a mystery to him,
what sort of people would come into a strange house and fuck in a kitchen sink—not to mention what sort of people
could
fuck in a kitchen sink—and even tried it himself once or twice, but more comfortable than that was being punched in the face
back at Joe Frazier’s gym.

Strangely enough, especially considering the jaded nature of the fighting public in general and in Philadelphia in particular,
Stanley developed a following in the city very early in his career. The following was an odd collection of women, some of
whom would happily try it in the sink, and an odd collection of friends. He was never short of friends and women, except at
Frazier’s gym, where there were no women, and his peers—as Stanley referred to the other fighters—had begun to sense that
the poundings he was taking were not discouraging him, as they were intended to, but were, like everything else at the time,
amusements. And in this happy frame of mind, Stanley was learning, and slowly narrowing the gap. Understandably, the peers
found this insulting.

I
t is not a well-known fact, but the last time anybody remembers seeing her upright and under her own power, Margaret Truman
was in the vicinity of Spooner and Stanley Faint. It could be said that this was the day they all met, except Margaret did
not say as much as howdy-do to Spooner and left without exchanging a single pleasantry with Stanley. This in spite of the
fact that Stanley and Spooner had both rearranged their social schedules to fit her in.

Still, it could be said that Margaret Truman brought them together—Spooner and Stanley Faint—and this meeting occurred not
in some bar or after Stanley had flattened someone in Atlantic City or Las Vegas, but at a fifty-dollar-a-plate literary luncheon
sponsored annually by the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and held in the grand ballroom of the Sheridan Hotel on Market Street in Center City. A frontal system had moved in that
morning from the south, and the grand ballroom was standing-room-only and smelled like a Mississippi terrarium—a certain sweet
mildew that Spooner had noticed before at gatherings of aged women. Chairs were set up for a thousand of them that day, fourteen
to a table, and every seat was taken, with the exception of a single table on the left side down in front, which was surrounded
by chairs recently vacated, left out of true with the table settings, napkins tossed into plates or on the floor, a few glasses
of water with lipstick-blotted rims, all emanating a feeling to Spooner, sitting above the table at the dais at the end of
the room, of a bird nest ravaged by a cat.

Sitting alone in this nest was a large, freely perspiring man in jogging pants and a sweatshirt that read I’M ON THE RAG,
but who somehow, in spite of the jogging shoes and the jogging togs, didn’t look like a jogger.

But live and learn. Until fifteen minutes before, the specimen at the otherwise-empty table had in fact been jogging, or at
least running at some mingling speed through Center City, and had rounded the corner on Market Street and spotted the sign
on the hotel marquee.

Thus Spooner first laid eyes on Stanley Faint from the dais that he—Spooner—was sharing with Margaret Truman, waiting his
turn to read. Spooner had taken pain medication as he entered the hotel, correctly anticipating an uncomfortable afternoon,
and under the medication’s flush of generosity was at this moment feeling like Clarence Darrow and experiencing a terrible
urge to take Miss Truman’s case, to somehow defend her against her own prose. She was at the lectern now, reading from her
new mystery novel to a throng of citizens who had by this time begun to look to him more like a choir than a jury. Dropped
mouths, slack jaws, and double chins. Miss Truman was doing very well with the audience, which was clearly attached to her
and perhaps even loved her, but the words, the words. What could these people be hearing?

The sentences rolled out of Miss Truman, bloodless and arthritic, one after another, more dangling fancies stuck to the ends
than a French tickler.

At this point in the story, Spooner had written two novels of his own, which is what he was doing at a
Philadelphia Inquirer
literary luncheon in the first place. He had been the subject of a dozen magazine stories that year, and he’d had invitations
to speak at universities that until recently wouldn’t have allowed him on campus to cut the grass. There had even been invitations
to teach. More important to Spooner, the books had pleased Calmer, who could not have been more surprised if he’d found a
couple of manuscripts in the doghouse after old Fuzzy died.

For Spooner, though, the novelty of being a novelist had already begun to wear off, and he’d been turning down invitations
to speak, but in the end, like Stanley Faint, he could not pass up a shot at Margaret Truman, and was sitting behind her now,
waiting for her to polish off the English language for good, and trying to imagine what it would be like to be Harry Truman’s
only child, to wake up on that first morning that FDR didn’t and find yourself suddenly insulated and protected for every
minute of the rest of your stay here on earth. A whole life ahead of you with no one to suggest, for instance, that you might
want to rethink singing in public, or writing books under your own name. Or even that you might want to choose a different
fragrance or go easy on the lipstick. The thought had occurred to Spooner previously, usually sitting around some anonymous
newspaper bar, listening to reporters grumbling over a changed word or phrase in a lead paragraph, that what the world needed
these days was more discouragement than it was getting at home.

He thought of example after example, could even remember some of the leads themselves, and occupied in this way, his mind
wandered out of the yard, as they say, which could only be a bad thing when he was waiting to speak in public. For public
speaking, it was vital to have Spooner focused on the matter at hand. Vital. Passing through his head just now, for instance,
was the idea of following Miss Truman’s act with a few impressions. He did a pretty good seagull, if he said so himself, and
if they liked that and warmed up to him a little, he did an excellent pussy.

Margaret Truman was coming to the end now, and although he was trying, Spooner could not unfasten himself from the notion
of at least doing the seagull. Of the pussy business—or snatch, as it was called in less refined circles—he was still calculating
the pluses and minuses. The problem with doing the pussy was that it was a visual sort of impression, and you needed pretty
good vision to appreciate it. He glanced again at the audience, the vast, milky-eyed public. How to make them love him? He
was nervous—he was always nervous before he spoke publicly—but calmed himself with the knowledge that in a hundred days the
ones who weren’t dead would have forgotten him anyway.

On the table in front of Spooner was a microphone, a glass of water, and a copy of his own new book, a story wrapped around
the town of Deadwood in the last days of Bill Hickok. He reconsidered his plans, deciding to read a little of it, and then,
if it wasn’t going well, to do the seagull to wake everybody up.