Algren at Sea Page 10

  It had been in April, too, that a thirty-year-old Algerian woman, an attorney named Gisèle Halimi, had come to Mme. de Beauvoir with the story of Djamila Boupacha.

  On the night of February 10, 1960, Djamila Boupacha, twenty-two, a member of the F.L.N., was arrested and sent by the French to the camp of El Biar. Arrested with her was her father, Abdellaziz Boupacha, seventy; his pregnant daughter, Néfissa Boupacha, eighteen; and his son-in-law, Ahmed, thirty. The pregnant girl was put in solitary confinement but suffered no violence. Her husband and father and Dajmila Boupacha were tortured.

  Mlle. Boupacha was told, “If we raped you, you might take pleasure”—and was thereupon impaled on a bottle in the hands of a French soldier. Mlle. Boupacha was a virgin.

  Mme. Halimi’s plea, for Mlle. Boupacha to Mme. de Beauvoir, was to have her client transferred for trial to Paris, both to prevent further torture and to obtain a fair trial. Mme. de Beauvoir’s account of the story in L’ Express was subsequently seized in Algiers, but it broke in the American press and the story was out. Although Mme. Halimi has not succeeded in getting her client to Paris for trial, there are no indications that the girl has been tortured further.

  The people partying through the rooms had come from places like Fort Dodge and East Jesus, Kansas, because they had found Fort Dodge and East Jesus unbearable. So they had immediately set up small Fort Dodges and East Jesuses on the Left Bank in order to Keep Paris Away. The last people they wanted to see were the French, who had troubles nobody was concerned with in Fort Dodge and East Jesus. They had come to see other people from other Fort Dodges and other East Jesuses in order to talk about how things used to be in Fort Dodge and East Jesus.

  One could hardly blame them for believing in an acquisitive economy which enabled them to live without feeling acquisitive. But now they didn’t know what else to do with themselves. By and large, they seemed to be people whose feelings had been hurt because they had only one of everything while others owned two. All the same I was happy to meet them, because I suspect American affluence has come to depend upon a fundamental corruption to which I felt capable of contributing. I hadn’t been driven to Paris by disenchantment over the Black Sox scandal so much as I’d been drawn by rumors of lonely Americans looking for dinner guests who were bilingual. I speak both English and Chicagoese.

  Already I had introduced myself to several film writers who were frankly disapproving of a nakedly competitive economy unless it gave them a head start. One of these, wearing a sweat shirt on which his initials had been sewn, was particularly scornful of any economy in the hands of French waiters.

  “What they call breakfast in this country! What they call coffee!” he warned the assembled expatriates—”it took me forty-five minutes to get ham and eggs this morning!”

  Of course, when you write for the movies every minute counts, but why did this thinker want to get up before Darryl Zanuck? I had once seen his picture in Time, routing the foe with a samurai sword bought in Manila after the war, but I hadn’t read the book. All the same, the picture had left me with a strong impression that at last America had a novelist who could slice off your head at a single stroke without going on safari. I haven’t gotten around to slicing off somebody’s head but am willing to give it up if the other side will. This fellow didn’t strike me so much as being a downright expatriate as he did a fellow who was afraid he’d go broke before he was ninety-two if he stayed in the States.

  What had made him think he wouldn’t have to pay for his meals if he moved to Paris I don’t know. He was pretty hot about it.

  “They don’t even know what a toasted cheeseburger is! Try to get a chocolate malted!” This Pearl Harbor Paul Revere circled the room spreading the alarm—“the hell with servees compree!” He looked over at me but saw I wasn’t wearing a napkin over my arm so he didn’t charge. I wondered why anyone would come such a distance just to be made a fool of by French waiters.

  Yet I once knew a fellow from East Jesus who fell in love, and the girl failed to mention that she’d once had a roll in the hay with the pinball champion of West Jesus. The new beau caught the scent, challenged the earlier conqueror to a pinball tournament, and then punched him silly over a pinball technicality.

  And to this very day the pinball champion of West Jesus thinks he was whipped just because he was outweighed. It wasn’t him who put two pounds of sugar in the new beau’s gas tank the next day, I happen to know. It was just the girl’s way of showing she still thought of her first hay-roll fondly.

  Was this fellow who had hacked his way through the jungle single-handed for Time this type of athlete or had he made sergeant on sheer ability? Is the pen really mightier than the sword? Should the spitball be made legal? Can Missouri remain half slave and half free? If Jerry Lewis, Jr., and Norman Mailer actually are two different persons, how come nobody has ever seen them together? These and other problems now perplexing Western civilization crossed my mind while I worked my way toward another shot at the Scotch.

  On the other side of the room an unescorted woman, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, was growing hysterical over the difficulty of finding a mate. If she took off the glasses and pulled her skirt down over her knees she might do some good in the few years remaining to her was my figuring. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t a mate for herself that was giving her concern, but one for her ladylike boxer.

  “I won’t have my Mimi made a fool of!” she warned everybody, as though the room were full of people who planned to have their Great Danes seduce little Mimi, “My Mimi is going to be properly mated!”

  Although they owned apartments and children and cars, these people seemed strangely to feel they’d been left out when the real goodies had been passed around. Each seemed like an only child that was trying too late to learn how to play.

  There was something about the way they ate that would give you a weak streak right through your middle, particularly if you were hungry too. They ate as though they were in need of something more than food, and I’m sure they were.

  The athlete in the sweat shirt was eating everything that wasn’t moving, so I kept shifting from one foot to another so he wouldn’t splash mustard over me. I wasn’t hungry myself and so limited myself to things that weren’t big enough to bite back.

  Somebody mentioned a friend who had missed a plane by five minutes and was still arguing with a reservation clerk about it when the plane came down in flames on the other side of the field.

  “I never have that kind of luck,” the pinball fellow complained at this news, “Oh, no, not me—I’d have been on it,” and walked off grieving over his premature demise, his work half finished, his songs half sung. Still and all, he appeared to have been well brought up and I suppose that’s where the trouble began. He came over to me holding a loaf of bread half the size of himself, stuffed with something that was wriggling to get out, yet he kept a firm hold.

  “I don’t buy this servees compree deal,” he let me know.

  “You don’t have to tip, Zane,” a girl lying on her side, reading a letter, glanced up to inform him and she wasn’t lying on her side for fun. “As a matter of fact, you don’t have to tip at all. It’s just a little something extra.”

  “PAR-DON-AY-MWA, Madame,” the witty chap excused himself, “but since when did anyone ever give me ‘a little something extra?’”

  Buddy, it occurred to me, if this is your old lady you have certainly been given a great deal extra and the benefit of the doubt as well, but I didn’t express this notion as I was on a tight schedule myself. Till the bar went dry.

  The girl held out her Martini glass to him and he peered down into it, thinking she was offering him a drink; only, the glass was dry. He couldn’t figure that one out. Then he saw the olive and it came to him that she wanted him to eat it. He popped it in his mouth. At least they weren’t hiding the olives on him.

  “She wants another Martini,” I explained, not wishing an expectant mother to tire herself by holding out her arm indefinite
ly from a prone position.

  “You had one, honey,” he remembered when they had first met.

  “That was for Baby,” she explained, “now get one for Mother.” He finally got the idea and wheeled off as if gin were going out of style. I’d been wondering which of the paralyzed embryos stalking her premises this girl had gotten careless with, but now I didn’t have to wonder any longer. I liked her approach to motherhood so much that I sat beside her to see what else I could do for her.

  “I’d like to read your mail,” I told her.

  “It’s just from an ex-fighter in a fix,” she told me, folding the letter.

  “I know all the ex-fighters in a fix,” I assured her, taking the letter from her, “and some people who can’t blame it on boxing. I even know one ex-fighter who has never been in a fix. Do you know Roger Donoghue?”

  This is a standard gimmick I employ, in tight situations, about a fellow who used to fight around New York, in order to avoid being crushed by such issues as whether the service is better on a Dutch or a French line or What Would You Have Done If You Had Been Mary McCarthy When Françoise Sagan Came Along? As long as I can stay clear of serious subjects, I may add, I can be a dangerous conversationalist.

  “I saw Roger Donahue the first time he fought Flores,” the girl told me, “he won.”

  “He won the second time, too,” I informed her, “he always did have color.”

  “He wasn’t all color,” she corrected me, “Roger really could fight.”

  “The night I saw him he wasn’t forcing himself,” I remembered, but I was just egging her on. Pregnancy had put a silver bell in her voice and I liked hearing it tinkle.

  She was no beauty but she was a beauty all the same. She was the only person around who didn’t seem to feel that she was being made a fool of if she couldn’t get a filet topped by a mushroom the size of a baby bison in four minutes flat. Anybody who didn’t like her on sight had a mind that had recently snapped.

  “He seldom forced himself,” she told me, “because he seldom had to.” There was something to what the girl was telling me, because this Donoghue, at one time, might have been welterweight champion of the world were it customary to give the title to the most articulate contender. Actually Roger Donoghue was the unrecognized champion of the world at not getting hit, but there now they don’t give the title for that either. The fact is that at one time nothing stood between this athlete and the welterweight title except four fellows named Young, Graham, Vejar, and Gavilan. Young and Graham were ready to concede as they were furious about being shifted around in the rankings every other week and Gavilan was out of town, so nothing stood between Donoghue and the title except Chico Vejar. But instead of matching him with Vejar, the people behind Donoghue let him take on an unknown to whom Donoghue lost with such sudden grace that he was immediately advanced in the rankings from sixth to twenty-third, thus breaking the world’s record for the longest leap ever made backward by a welterweight from Brooklyn sponsored by Budd Schulberg. This unexpected windfall gained young Donoghue his choice of carrying his own bucket or writing for the movies. Long past his prime at twenty-two, the sensible youth made the right decision and has never been heard from since.

  “Roger was the last fighter wearing a shamrock on his trunks who could whip top contenders,” she told me. “Could he have whipped Gavilan?”

  “No, but he could have whipped Chico Vejar.”

  “Then I could have gotten a draw!”—I leaped up, keeping my left in Chico’s face, the right cocked and ready to cross, only the girl pulled me back down. She was a very strong girl. Anybody who didn’t admire her inordinately was no longer among the living.

  “What happened to Donoghue?” I wanted to know. “Did we get to fight Vejar? I’ve been away for some time.”

  “We never got to fight Vejar,” she told me gently, “they got us an opponent who wasn’t even ranked in his own family and he knocked us cold almost immediately.”

  “At St. Nick’s?” I asked, trying my very best to remember.

  “What’s the difference?” she asked, “It was Solly Levitt, who used to come out saying, ‘Keep punching, Solly,’ to himself so he wouldn’t forget what he was there for. Roger hit him twenty straight lefts, but Solly still knew what he was there for. Roger leaned in with the right but he leaned too far and when he came to he thought he’d been dancing and one of the chandeliers had fallen.”

  “I once knew another fighter who could whip top contenders with ease, nonchalantly—one-handed,” I recalled, “but always had trouble with opponents. He fought Satterfield in Chicago after Satterfield had been kayoed by Rex Layne, of all people, and got himself knocked out twice in one night. In fact, this fellow did this sort of thing so often they finally had to put him in a jail—and right there is another funny thing, because every time this fellow went to prison and everybody would say he was through, he would come out a better fighter than when he went in. The reason for this was that, outside of jail, he never went to bed, whereas he always did time in prisons where the warden put the men to bed early.”

  “If you’re talking about Vince Loman,” the girl told me, mentioning a former heavyweight whose name isn’t Vince Loman, “the letter you’re holding is from him. I used to date him. You had to be careful not to leave money around when he was drinking, because he would tear it up. Vince really liked to tear up money.”

  I was pleased with myself at swinging the conversation to a fellow like Vince Loman who could get himself knocked out twice in a single night whereas the best Roger Donoghue had ever done along those lines was once in a night and to this very day never tears up money.

  Fighters who go into the tank leave my interest in boxing undismayed, because I feel that so long as our businessmen stay corrupt our fighters will continue to do their part.

  Apparently the girl shared this clever view, as she began to tell me how the fellow whose letter I was holding once went into the tank for the champion of Inner Soho.

  “Vince really stank the joint up that night,” she recalled with genuine pride in Vince. While Soho was running up and down hill strengthening his leg muscles, Vince and his manager were training with two hookers from Piccadilly. They had to do this to protect the ten grand apiece they had bet against Vince, to keep him from getting into shape. They always shared fifty-fifty on tank jobs arid were already sharing the redhead and the blonde.

  “The DO NOT DISTURB sign was out, but they’d left a call for noon of the day of the fight to give Vince eight hours to strengthen his leg muscles. But all four were sleeping the sleep of the stewed, so nobody heard the phone until late afternoon, when the redhead knocked it off the hook and the clatter woke the blonde, who shoved the manager off the bed because he was snoring. He landed on Vince, who had been sleeping on the floor for two days. Somebody looked at the calendar and, between the manager and the two girls, they got Vince into the shower and into his trunks and into his corner, where he started falling asleep again.

  “The sixty-second buzzer woke him, the bucket-man pushed him out and what Vince saw scared him, he told me later, because it was something like a double-image out of a TV screen coming right at him. He threw a right-hand shot and hit the correct image and there was the correct image on the floor and the half of Soho hollering ‘Heah! heah!’ and Vince’s manager hollering something else Vince couldn’t quite make out, but it sounded like ‘Pick him up! Pick him up!’ so he went over and tried to pick Soho up, but the ref waved him off and wouldn’t start a count until Vince found a neutral corner. He tried three of them before he found one that seemed to satisfy everybody, and by that time Soho was on his feet and Vince realized what an awful thing he had just almost done.

  “So he jumped Soho up and down and danced him around the rest of the round to bring him around as Soho was still suffering since Vince had fractured his jaw in two places.

  “When he came back to his corner Vince said, ‘This guy is going to faint on me.’ ‘Hold him up,’ the bucket-man
told Vince, so Vince did, and in the fourth round Soho was his old self again and threw a hook like he was playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, and Vince went down as if the donkey had fallen on him.

  “It was purely awful. I never saw anything so raw in all my life. What a ham. He made them carry him to his corner and he wasn’t through then. He decided to milk the situation, and the bucket-man and the manager had to lift him back to the dressing room before he would admit he was conscious. Vince was a terrible ham.”

  The letter I had been holding was written by a man with large hands not used to holding a pencil, so I figured it must be from a correspondent of The Chicago Tribune. But no, it really was from the fellow who liked to tear up money.

  His boxing career had been interrupted three times by prison, and the burden of the letter was that it might turn out that it was only his prison career that had been interrupted by boxing, because one more offense could send him to the joint for keeps and he’d recently committed it.

  He was working as a bartender on a transatlantic liner, and had crossed the Atlantic seventeen times without disembarking as he didn’t wish to go back to the place where the warden puts the boys to bed early. Why this floating bartender felt he was better off on an ocean I don’t know, as the Atlantic closes down at nine. I don’t know about the Mediterranean, they may stay open all night there.

  “Why,” I asked the girl, “can’t the New York Police Department dispatch a couple flics to climb the gangplank if the boat should make the Port of New York any time other than the Jewish holidays?”

  “Because The Department doesn’t know Vince is at sea,” she explained; “they’re looking for him on dry land.”

  The idea of anyone looking for Vince Loman on dry land struck me as slightly hilarious. “I have an idea how to get your friend loose of the law,” I suggested; “have them pick up Archie Moore instead—he never goes into hiding.”

  The girl didn’t laugh, possibly because nothing comical had been said. She wanted to finish her story.