The Lankville Daily News

By Chico Shermey (1945-1955, 62W 15L, 27KO)

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I grew up in a tough part of Eastern Lankville– Christ, there were five or six beheadings a day.  It was an old Island Crime Syndicate– they had never renounced their back-ass ways.  You could always see them on the little beach, eating pancakes in a tent.  I mean, who the hell does that anymore, right?

I started boxing when I was 13.  Saved me from the streets.  Hooked up with Gino Rices.  Gino had a great boxing mind.  He was all of about four feet tall but he could whip anyone.  “It’s all about geometry, boys,” he would say.  We were never sure what he was talking about, not being educated.  Then, sometimes he’d say it was all about the angles.  “Learn your angles and you’ll never lose, not once.”  Then he’d tell us all about them– the acute, the obtuse, Knapp’s Patience, all of them.

I guess I probably had about ten fights in the amateurs.  I faced off against Junior Spotts for the Tawny Gloves Competition in early ’44 and beat him in 5 rounds on a knockout.  Junior tried to come up with this big uppercut and he missed and he got off balance and fell straight out of the ring into the press row.  Well, the press, they started just wailing on him and then they threw him back in the ring and by then it was a done deal.  I got that beautiful silver belt, hand-engraved in the Outer Depths.  Used to wear that thing everywhere– I’d go out just to the bank or something and I’d wear that belt, no shirt.  Finally, this policeman, he said, “Chico, we need you to put a top on.  We can’t have that with all the women around.”  I didn’t want no trouble so I started wearing a little button-up number but I still wore the belt underneath.  I was proud.

It was about that time that I met my wife.  We used to go everywhere and by then, of course, I was a pro and we used to get good tables at all the big places– Ted’s Eatery, the Meretricious Top Hat, Gelsey’s French Toast (that’s before it went pornographic).  We had a good life for awhile and then I found out about her fucking this blonde pretty boy and it was all I could take.  I’d go into the ring just fuming and I’d take all that jealousy out on the other fighter.  I won 13 straight at one point, all by knockout.

Gino, he tried all the could to get me a prizefight.  They’d never give me a go at the champ though.  I know about ’52, ’53, I would ‘a won.  Not a doubt in my mind.

Things started to go downhill from there.  I got injured one time playing Lingus Nets over the summer and my shoulder never was right again.  I became estranged from the wife– I just could never not picture her fucking that blonde pretty boy.

Before I even knew what hit me, I was out of boxing.  I was living in a filthy room above an electronics store– Christ, they had peeling wallpaper coming down every place.  There was a guy in the next room who was fairly quiet except twice a day when he would suddenly scream SMILE, PEOPLE!  Always scared the Christ out of me for a second but then I got used to it.

Eventually, things got a little better for me.  Moved out to Sherryville in the Inner Depths– got a little place with a porch.  They got a bus station over there and I watch them come and go all day and I read the paper and listen to the radio.  Sometimes, I look past the station to the Big Hill where an enormous pumpkin fire has been burning for over five years.  They can’t figure out what the hell to do with the damn thing.  Everything smells like burnt pumpkins.  You can’t get that shit out of the your clothes.  Don’t matter how hard you try.

By Sonny Shorts (1924-1930, 33W 5L, 26KO)

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I am 108 years old so you will have to forgive me if my memory is not very good.  I have been in this Charity House for a very long time.  I grew up here.  Not in the Charity House I mean, I grew up in a house down the street.  My father and mother ran a barrels store.  It’s all farmland around here.

The Charity House is haunted.  Did you know that?  There is a vast monstrosity that lurks here.  I told the front desk about it and they moved me to another room.  They put a man named Heinz in the old room and he was killed.  When I continued to complain, they tore the walls out.  There was nothing there but ancient newspaper, balled up to create insulation.  But you could see something else as well.  It was not immediately visible but it was there.

I owned a house for a long time.  Had a lovely garage with the smoothest concrete floor imaginable.  I lived all alone; a confirmed bachelor.  For many years, there was an empty, untilled field behind the hedges in my yard.  I was pleased by this.  And then, one year, they planted corn.  The husks blew into my backyard, creating a scenario of deep confusion and resulting in melancholia.  I know it seems strange now to speak those words aloud but that was the feeling that came over me then.  It remained that way for a number of years.

I sold the house and moved to a smaller house.  It had a small side porch that looked out over the fields.  I would put out a TV tray with a little radio and some lemonade and a plate of meat.  If I tilted the radio in such a way and pulled the antenna all the way out, I could receive distant signals from over the mountain.  Every once in awhile, I could pick up a Lingus Nets match out of Lankville.

The new house did not have a garage.  It just had a pebbly little driveway that suddenly fell off into a deep chasm.  I purchased a package of these large funny balls for youngsters and tied them to some string so that I could tell where I had to stop the car before it fell off into the precipice.  But it rained once and the car slid forward anyway.  That elicited a second, deeper period of angry befuddlement, crying and inner pandemonium.

It was then that I became a recluse.  I placed heavy cardboard over all the windows and created a complex booby trap system about the house.  I called an insurance salesman.  “Come over right away,” I told him.  “I want to buy TONS of insurance.”  I heard him pull up in the pebbly driveway.  He knocked on the front door and I waited in the darkness behind a couch.  After some time, the knob turned slowly.  He stepped into the room and called my name.  He was beheaded instantly.

I went away to prison.  It was a special ward for the elderly.  The ward was also haunted.  The same abomination was there as it had always been.  I was assigned the job of…

An intern suddenly entered the room and informed Shorts that it was time for a snack.  The interview ended without Shorts discussing boxing.

By Herm Mount-Vince  (1941-1949, 26W, 24L, 9KO)

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Well, when you first came by here, I thought you wanted to compliment me on my lawn.  Look here, I’m 85 years old and I keep a good lawn.  You look at the areas near the sidewalk, you see them?  Normally people got big god damn mud patches there.  I can’t stand the sight of that.  But look at my lawn.  Grass all the way to the sidewalk.  Run your hand through that.  Go on, run your god damn hand through it.  [The interviewer was reticent but Mount-Vince insisted to the point of near-violence].  Alright, that was easy enough, wasn’t it?  What was the big god damn deal?  You feel that– that’s what they call LUSH.  I keep a good lawn.  Best in the neighborhood.

Anyway, I wasn’t what you’d really call a serious boxer.  I had quick hands but they used to say I had concrete legs.  They meant that I couldn’t move my legs, not that they were strong as concrete– just that they were, didn’t move, right?  Do you understand?  Heavy legs.  So, usually a guy would dance around me and I couldn’t keep up.  I’d get tired out and then after awhile I’d just sort of fall down.  I got knocked out quite often.

I remember one time out in the Desert region.  They had a place called the Boulevard Arena and I fought there often.  They put me on a bill with Curtis Extension-Wand [middleweight champion, 1946-1948].  I got to meet him beforehand.  He was alright.  He had a funny habit of putting a toothpick in his mouth.  That’s much as I remember.  I think I got knocked out in that fight.

I used to have all my clippings.  Used to get real angry when my clippings weren’t favorable.  There was one writer who said, and I’ll never forget it, “Mount-Vince is distinctly mediocre; the sort of blinkered individual that comes along upon occasion taking the same route that feces might take along a sewer pipe.”  Yep.  Then later in the article he said that I was a “travesty” and “an aggregation of different feces that causes a system clog thereby requiring service.”   Now, I never done nothing to this guy.

I met him outside a restaurant one time, me and some of the fellows.  We took his coat and shoved it into a newspaper box.  I know it don’t sound like much but that was a big insult back then.

You need to seed your lawn in the fall.  When you get them cold nights.  That’s the best time.

By Pineapple Duvet  (1938-1942, 10W, 5L, 8KO)

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My first fight was in Southern Lankville.  And they had a guy there that said, “why do you fight in them leather trunks?  Don’t you know we got the cotton down here?  It breathes better.”  He took me out to a field and the next I knew I was, you know, actually working in the field.  I got confused.  So, I missed the fight.

I got blackballed after that.  For about 13 years.  By the time of my next fight, I couldn’t keep my hands up.  Fortunately, I could throw a real haymaker.  I’d take hundreds of blows straight in the face and then I’d throw that ol’ haymaker and knock the guy out.  Long as I could get that haymaker off, I’d generally win.  Then, I’d sit at a table, carve up a pineapple and listen to Richard and the Postman on the radio.  That’s how I got my nicknames.  I was known by Pineapple in the ring and “The Postman” out of it.”

One time, after I knocked out Floyd Roh, I was sitting at the table carving up a pineapple.  And there was this girl there.  I don’t know where she come from.  I don’t know who let her in the house.  But she never did leave and I couldn’t argue with her cause she started buying the pineapples.  I let her stay and I give her a room in the attic and then we got married and she come down to my room.  We decided to have children and we gave it a go once and we had Lance.  Then we give it a go again and we had Belinda.  And then she went back up to the attic.  But she always had them pineapples.

I had to give up the ring in ’42 when I got drafted for the First Great Depths War.  I was on a big gunboat that got lost at sea.  We were lost for about five years or so.  It was quite a time.

I worked for General Magnets after that.  We made magnets in a general way.  Like them little grapes you put on a refrigerator.  But I’m glad for my time in the ring.