“Tony Canzoneri?”

          “Yeah, Tony Canzoneri. This is Tony Canzoneri.”

          I shook hands again with Tony—my hand disappeared in his—then he sank back in his chair, as if the effort of meeting me had exhausted him. They were a great combination, the famous fighter on the skids and his peppery little promotion man. It was a good story. But there were holes in it. This Tony guy was obviously an athlete but he must have fought LaMotta when he was a baby because Jake LaMotta is 80-something now and this Tony looked to be only about 45 or 50 tops.

          When Tony got up to go to the toilet I plied Jack with questions.

          “What’s the matter with him? Why doesn’t he talk?”

          “Punchy.” Jack tapped his forehead. “He’s punchy. Say, you wanna get on a wine? I’ve got 76 cents.”

          Later I looked up Tony Canzoneri at a wifi on Fairfax. Tony Canzoneri was a lightweight and LaMotta was a middleweight. They never fought. Besides, Tony Canzoneri passed away in 1959.

          Weeks or months went by and I ran into Tony and Jack again, this time up by Bullocks Wilshire. They were coming on to the tourists. Jack, wearing a little red mountaineer’s hat, was expertly working the crowd while Tony lounged seductively on a bus bench like a big tawny tiger. Jack and Tony. They were raking it in. There’s no getting around it, I thought, this Tony’s got charisma up the ass. The tourists couldn’t take their eyes off him. They clustered around his bus bench, snapping photos and begging for autographs. I kept back out of the way. I didn’t want to queer their deal. After things died down I went up to Jack. I wanted to see if he remembered me. He did, and so did Tony. Jack handed me a fivespot right away—“for eats”—and then I grasped Tony’s paw, that enormous strangely soft hand of his, like a padded tiger paw. Tony smiled faintly and murmured something like “Buon Giorno.” He kept pulling on a bottle, grimly, as if he had a horror of being sober. It was the hard stuff, a flat pint tightly wrapped in brown bag paper.

          “Come on over to the park after a few,” Jack said. “We’re gonna score a jug.”

          I went up to the Alexandria Jack in the Box for a Jumbo Jack and fries, but when I got back down to Lafayette Park Jack and Tony had moved on.

          And now here we were at Grand Central Market, Jack and I. We were hungry and we were dead broke, but the coffee was good, the waitress was pretty, and it was a brand new day.

          “I didn’t care much for the movie,” Jack said.

          “Night of the Living Dead? Naw, it was pretty cheesy.”

          Grand Central Market. What a place. Nothing like it anywhere in the world. Strangled sea creatures lolling on beds of crushed ice, goggling like embryos torn from the womb. Glistening loaves of bread, steaming kettles of menudo, yellow wheels of cheese. The food! The smells! My God, it’ll drive you crazy. And everywhere a buzzing of dialects, a babble of tongues. The dirty coins change hands, the mouths open and snap shut, the food goes down the gullet, the shopping bags are stuffed and the buyers totter off, conversing in their own special lingo.

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