Free Some Faces in the Crowd by Budd Schulberg Page B

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.

MEMORY IN WHITE
    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