Some Faces in the Crowd (8 page)

“It might not be so bad,” Nathan said, giving way to the sentimentality that thrives in his profession. “Mimi Carteret used to be a lot of fun.”

“I can just imagine,” said Lita. “I’ll bet she does a mean Turkey Trot.”

“Lew, do you think this means he’s going to give you a chance again?” Mimi Carteret whispered as they walked off the dance floor together, “Easy on the wine, darling. We just can’t let anything go wrong tonight.”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he answered. “I’m watching. I’m waiting for the right moment to talk to him.”

Lita and Bruce were dancing again and Jenny was alone with A. D. at the table when the Carterets returned. It was the moment Jenny had been working toward. She could hardly wait to know what he thought of the test.

“I don’t think it does you justice,” Nathan was saying. “The cameraman didn’t know how to light you at all. I think you have great possibilities.”

Jenny smiled happily, the wine and encouragement going to her head, and Nathan reached over and patted her hand in what was meant to seem a fatherly gesture, though he lingered a moment too long. But Jenny hardly noticed, swept along in the dream.

Lew Carteret looked at his watch nervously. It was almost time for the floor show. There wouldn’t be much chance to talk during the acts, and after that, the party would be over. He looked across at Mimi, trying to find the courage to put it up to A. D. If only A. D. would give him an opening. Lita and Bruce were watching too, wondering when to bring up
Wagons Westward.
And André, behind the head waiter’s mask was thinking, Only ten more minutes and I will he speaking to A. D. about my scenario.

“André,” Nathan called, and the head waiter snapped to attention. “Are you sure there hasn’t been a call for me?”

“No, m’sieur. I would call you right away, m’sieur.”

Nathan frowned. “Well, make sure. It should have been here by now.” He felt angry with himself for losing his patience. There was no reason to be so upset. This was just another long-distance call. He had talked to New York a thousand times before—about matters just as serious.

But when André came running with the message that New York was on the wire, he could not keep the old fear from knotting his stomach and he jostled the table in his anxiety to rise.

“You may take it in the second booth on the left, Mr. Nathan,” said Ava Gardner, as she looked up from her switchboard with a prefabricated smile. But he merely brushed by her and slammed the door of the booth behind him. The telephone girl looked after him with the dream in her eyes. When he comes out I’ll hafta think of something arresting to sayta him, she decided. God, wouldn’t it be funny if he did notice me!

Five minutes later she heard the door of the booth sliding open and she looked up and smiled. “Was the connection clear, Mr. Nathan?”

That might do for a starter, she thought. But he didn’t even look up. “Yes. I heard very well. Thank you,” he said. He put half a dollar down and walked on. He felt heavy, heavy all over, his body too heavy for his legs to support and his eyes too heavy for the sockets to hold. He walked back to the table without seeing the people who tried to catch his glance.

“Everything all right?” his wife asked.

“Yes. Yes,” he said. “Everything.”

Was that his voice? It didn’t sound like his voice. It sounded more like Lew Carteret’s voice. Poor old Lew. Those were great old times when we ran World-Wide together. And that time I lost my shirt in the market and Lew loaned me 50 G’s. Wonder what ever happened to Lew.

Then he realized this
was
Lew Carteret, and that he was listening to Lew’s voice. “A. D., this has sure been a tonic for Mimi and me. I know we didn’t come here to talk shop, but—well you always used to have faith in me, and …”

“Sure, sure, Lew,” A. D. said. “Here, you’re one behind. Let me pour it. For old times.”

He could feel an imperceptible trembling in his hand as he poured the wine.

Under the table a small, slender leg moved slowly, with a surreptitious life of its own, until it pressed meaningfully against his. Jenny had never slept with anybody except Bill. She was frightened, but not as frightened as she was of living the rest of her life in Hollywood as the wife of a grip in a bungalow court.

Bruce flipped open his cigarette case—the silver one that Lita had given him for his birthday—and lit a cigarette confidently. “By the way, A. D., Lita let me read the script on
Wagons.
That’s a terrific part, that bank clerk who has to go west for his health and falls in with a gang of rustlers. Wonderfully written. Who’s going to play it?”

“Any leading man in Hollywood except you,” Nathan said.

Bruce looked undressed without his assurance. The silence was terrible.

Lita said, “But, A. D., that part was written for Bruce.”

All the rest of his face seemed to be sagging, but Nathan’s hard black eyes watched them with bitter amusement. “There isn’t a part in the studio that’s written for Bruce. The only thing that kept Bruce from being fired months ago was me. And now there’s no longer me.”

Lita looked up, really frightened now. “A. D. What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m out,” he said. “Finished. Washed up. Through. Hudson called to say the Board voted to ask for my resignation.”

“What are you going to do now?” she said.

He thought of the thing he had promised himself to do when his time came, drop out of sight, break it off clean. Hollywood had no use for anticlimaxes on or off the screen. But as he sat there he knew what would really happen. Move over, Colonel Selig and J. C. Blackburn, he thought. Make room for another ghost.

The floor show was just starting. The undiscovered Rosemary Clooney was putting everything she had into her number, and playing right to A. D.’s table.
Don’t let the stars get in your eyes …

And as she sang, André smiled in anticipation. So far everything had gone just as he had planned. And now the time had come to move A. D. up to that ringside table.

H
E ALWAYS USED TO
stand at the entrance of the Grand Street gymnasium, a little yellow man in an immaculate white suit, white Panama hat, white shoes, white tie. This was Jose Fuentes.

If you remember him at all, and you must be an old-timer at the fight clubs if you do, you remember a tough little Mexican kid with a wild left hook, weak on brains but strong on heart. Young Pancho Villa the Third, he used to call himself. No champion, never in the big money, just another one of the kids who come along for a while, who only know how to throw roundhouse punches with either hand and to bounce up after a knockdown without bothering to take their count and get their wind. The kind the fans go crazy about for a year or two and then don’t recognize when they’re buying peanuts or papers from them outside the stadium a year or two later.

Club fighters, they’re called, a dime a dozen, easy to hit and hard to hurt. At least, hard to knock out. Plenty of hurt, sure, plenty of pain, but that all comes later, when they can’t seem to get fights any more, when they start hanging around the gym. Not training, not working, just sort of hanging around.

Now there are plenty of bums hanging around the gym every day in the week. A bum is any boxer who thinks he’s going to be on Easy Street when he hangs up his gloves, and winds up on Silly Avenue instead. After that, they just hang around. They hang around waiting for another break, another manager, or a chance to pick up two, three dollars a round sparring with somebody’s prospect, or a job as a second, or to put the bite on an old friend or a cocky youngster who wants to feel like a big shot. The gym is the only place they know, so all they can do is hang around and hope to make a dollar.

But no one ever hung around like Young Pancho Villa the Third. Young Pancho went into the occupation of hanging around the gym as if it were a serious and respectable profession. None of this sitting around all day on the long wooden benches with your legs stretched out in front of you as if life were one long rest period between rounds. No loitering for a man who calls himself Young Pancho Villa the Third, in honor of the Indian
guerrilla
whom the
compañeros
in the
cantinas
still sing that
corrido
about. And his valiant little namesake who lost his flyweight championship in a San Francisco ring, and, some hours later, his life in a San Francisco hospital. No panhandling for a man with a name like that. No, Young Pancho Villa the Third had a vision. He was going to get somewhere in the world. He was going to be an announcer.

For it was a funny thing, whenever he tried to think back to his days in the ring, all those, fights, even that high point in his career, that main event at the Legion when Pete Sarmiento had him down nine times but couldn’t put him away, all those beatings, all those rounds, all those punches he threw and the ones he caught, the whole thing seemed to run together. He would start thinking how it was in that tenth round against Sarmiento, hanging onto Pete to keep from going down, and instead he would be hanging onto Frankie Grandetta, or was it Baby Arizmendi? The memories kept spilling over and running together.

There was only one memory that stood out sharply, refusing to blend with the others. It was a memory in white, the memory of a man in a very white suit, a very important man with a megaphone who used to climb through the ropes while Young Pancho and his opponent were sitting in their corners, and say in a very important voice to which everybody listened in respectful silence, “Lay-deez and gen-tle-men …”

A white suit, a megaphone and everybody listening. That was the vision. Young Pancho Villa the Third, the stocky little Mex with a child’s face hammered flat as an English bulldog’s, walked down Main Street in pursuit of a vision, a white-linen, double-breasted vision that floated ahead of him, leading him past the burleycue houses and the pool parlors, the nickel flophouses, the dime flophouses and the exclusive clean-sheets-every-week two-bit flophouses, leading him past the saloons with their threadbare elegance, the gaudy juke boxes, the gaudy and threadbare B-girls, past all those wonderful and tempting ways to spend his money. But Young Pancho kept his thick little hands in his pockets until he came to Manny (Nothing Over Five Dollars) Liebowitz’ High Class Clothing Store for Men.

None of the other guys who hung around the gym were getting any gold stars on their report cards for neatness. Most of them wore suits that looked as if they had been used to mop up the floors of Happy Harry’s saloon on the corner. So Pancho was going to be smart. Pancho was going to look like class if it cost him a fortune. That suit in the window, for instance, that brand-new white linen suit, that was for Pancho. “Five Dollars,” a large card pinned to the coat beckoned to Pancho. “Five Dollars,” said another on the pants.

“I take suit in window,” Pancho said. “Wudja say,
amigo?”
asked Mr. Liebowitz. Pancho’s voice was husky and his words bumped against one another. Too many collisions between his brain and someone else’s fist had thickened his natural accent to an almost inarticulate jargon. “Punch-patter,” some of the boys described it.

“I take suit in window,” Pancho said, pointing a short, chunky finger at the one he wanted.

“And what a bargain!” Mr. Liebowitz began. “In all of Los Angeles show me another genuine linen for ten dollars.”

“Ten dollars?” said Pancho. “In window it say only five.”

“Five dollars,” said Mr. Liebowitz agreeably. “Sure, five dollars. Five for the coat and five for the pants. Just like it says in the window.”

Pancho went out into the street and gazed at the suit again. He pressed his nose against the window and then stepped back and appraised it like a connoisseur studying a work of art. It was so beautiful. It was so white and so dapper. For a luxury maybe ten dollars was awfully steep. But this was no luxury. This was an investment. This was the uniform Young Pancho Villa the Third would need in his chosen profession.

“You have my size?” he said. “Must fit very good.”

“Don’t take my word for it,” said Mr. Liebowitz. “My motto is Suit Yourself.
Suit
—Yourself. Get it?”

The suit might have been a good fit when Pancho was still making the featherweight limit. But he was almost a middleweight now and the coat button strained against his belly, the seat of his pants stretched skin-tight across his rump.

“Ugh, too tight,” Pancho gasped. “Got him bigger?”

“Bigger?” said Mr. Liebowitz. “You want to be in style, don’t you? That is just the way the college boys is wearing them this season. Just off the campus from UCLA!”

Young Pancho Villa the Third looked over his shoulder into the mirror. Not so bad at that. Nice and form-fitting. Not soiled and baggy like the pants on those bums around the gym.

Then he tried on the shoes. Pointed white shoes with special heels built up, almost like a girl’s. “Those are absolutely genuine imitation buck,” Mr. Liebowitz explained. “Marked down from four-fifty to one-ninety-nine.”

Young Pancho Villa the Third walked down Main Street in his white linen suit, a clean shirt, a white cotton tie, genuine imitation-buck shoes and a Panama hat worn at a rakish angle over one eye. The outfit had set him back thirteen ninety-nine, nearly all the money he had, but it was worth it. Then he went into a pawnshop and asked to look at megaphones. “I want biggest megaphone you got in place,” he said.

The pawnbroker handed a bulky, battered megaphone over the counter.

“Now I am fight announcer,” Young Pancho announced. He caressed the megaphone, raised it to his lips and shouted excitedly, “Een-tro-ducing Young Pancho Villa the Third, the chomp-peen announcer of the worrrrrld!”

The first day Pancho showed up at the gym in his new role he got his money’s worth out of that megaphone. When he put it to his mouth, he lifted his head and closed his eyes like a concert artist. He stood there in the corner by the entrance shouting his announcements into that megaphone, thrilled with the sound of the beautiful deep voice that rose from his lips like organ music. Or at least, so it seemed to him, as he paused to listen to it reverberating through the big, high-ceilinged room full of serious boys with narrow waists and glistening skins, bending, stretching, skipping, shadow-boxing, punching the bags or listening earnestly to the instructions of men with fat bellies, boneless noses, ulcers, dirty sweatshirts, brown hats pushed back from sweaty foreheads, the trainers, the managers, the experts.