I was a local celebrity again.
At roll call I watched betting markers change hands and got attaboys from cops I had never met before; Fat Johnny Vogel gave me the evil eye every time he passed me in the locker room. Sidwell, ever the rumor monger, said that two nightwatch blues had bet their cars, and the station commander, Captain Harwell, was holding the pink slips until after the fight. The dicks in Administrative Vice had suspended their bookie shakedowns because Mickey Cohen was taking in ten grand a day in markers and was kicking back 5 percent to the advertising agency employed by the city in its effort to pass the bond issue. Harry Cohn, Mr. Big at Columbia Pictures, had put down a bundle on me to win by decision, and if I delivered I got a hot weekend with Rita Hayworth.
None of it made sense, but all of it felt good, and I kept myself from going crazy by training harder than I ever had before.
At end of watch each day I headed straight for the gym and _worked_. Ignoring Blanchard and his brownnosing entourage and the off-duty cops who hovered around me, I hit the heavy bag, left jab–right cross–left hook, five minutes at a crack, on my toes the whole time; I sparred with my old pal Pete Lukins and rolled sets at the speed bag until sweat blinded me and my arms turned to rubber. I skipped rope and ran through the Elysian Park hills with two-pound weights strapped to my ankles, jabbing at tree limbs and bushes, outracing the trash can dogs who prowled there. At home, I gorged myself on liver, porterhouse steak and spinach and fell asleep before I could get out of my clothes.
Then, with the fight nine days away, I saw the old man and decided to take a dive for the money.
The occasion was my once-a-month visit, and I drove out to Lincoln Heights feeling guilty that I hadn’t shown up since I got the word that he was acting crazy again. I brought gifts to assuage that guilt: canned goodies scrounged from the markets on my beat and confiscated girlie mags. Pulling up in front of the house, I saw that they wouldn’t be enough.
The old man was sitting on the porch, swigging from a bottle of cough syrup. He had his BB pistol in one hand, absently taking shots at a formation of balsa wood airplanes lined up on the lawn. I parked, then walked over to him. His clothes were flecked with vomit and his bones protruded underneath them, poking out like they were joined to him at all the wrong angles. His breath stank, his eyes were yellow and filmy and the skin I could see underneath his crusty white beard was flush with broken veins. I reached down to help him to his feet; he swatted my hands, jabbering, “Scheisskopf! Kleine Scheisskopf!”
I pulled the old man up into a standing position. He dropped the BB pistol and Expectolar pint and said, “Guten Tag, Dwight,” like he had just seen me the day before.
I brushed tears from my eyes. “Speak English, Papa.”
The old man grabbed the crook of his right elbow and shook his fist at me in a slapdash fungoo. “Englisch Scheisser! Churchill Scheisser! Amerikanisch Juden Scheisser!”
I left him on the porch and checked out the house. The living room was littered with model airplane parts and open cans of beans with flies buzzing around them; the bedroom was wallpapered with cheesecake pics, most of them upside down. The bathroom stank of stale urine and the kitchen featured three cats snouting around in half-empty tunafish cans. They hissed at me as I approached; I threw a chair at them and went back to my father.
He was leaning on the porch rail, fingering his beard. Afraid he would topple over, I held his arm; afraid I would start to cry for real, I said, “Say something, Papa. Make me mad. Tell me how you managed to fuck up the house so bad in a month.”
My father tried to pull free. I held on tighter, then loosened my grip, afraid of snapping the bone like a twig. He said, “Du, Dwight? Du?” and I knew he’d had another stroke and lost his memory of English again. I searched my own memory for phrases in German and came up empty. As a boy I’d hated the man so much that I made myself forget the language he’d taught me.