“He wore his hair long and got into plenty of fights on the docks.”

“He lost those two fights to Goddard in Australia.”

“He taught Jack Johnson what he needed to know to become champion when they spent a month in a Galveston jail in 1901.”

The further we went on, the more we had to restrain ourselves from rushing into each other’s arms for the joy of it.

I mean, I almost rushed; Charley wasn’t getting around that well anymore. Don’t look for him in the Boston Marathon, he said.

There really wasn’t that much material on Choynski and
I turned out to know more than Charley. Back then, I was the world’s greatest authority on Joseph B. Choynski and I still didn’t know him at all. I told Charley I didn’t know where else to go. I’d run out of places to look for Choynski and didn’t like to think that I’d never find him.

I didn’t tell him about wanting to know another kind of everything about Choynski. I wanted to follow him as he walked home at night. I wanted to know what he smelled like, to hear the sound of his voice, to know the dimensions of his wife. I wanted to know if the reason he never had kids was because he had taken too many low blows.

“Fighters then were like hobos. Fights were illegal almost everyplace. They just drifted around. There weren’t any of those commissions back then and all those letters they have now: wbo, wbc, ibf, whatever the fuck they are. Look, some places boxers were celebrities, most places they were just trying to make a buck.”

Charley invited me back the next day so he could give me a picture of Choynski to copy. He would have had it ready that day, but I could have been full of shit and he didn’t like to waste his time on morons.