Cockfighter - Charles Ray Willeford [26]
I left my room, walked down the street to a café and ate two hamburgers and drank two glasses of milk. When I returned to my room, I nipped at the gin and read my new Southern Cockfighter magazine. The magazine had been published and mailed out before the Belle Glade derby, but there was a short item about the Homestead pitting, and my name was mentioned in Red Carey's column, “On the Gaff.”
Looks like bad luck is still dogging Silent Frank Mansfield. His sad showing at Homestead makes us wonder if his keeping methods are off the beam. Another season like his last three, and we doubt if he'll still be on the S.C. T. rolls.
The item should have irritated me, but it didn't. A columnist has to put something in his column, and I was fair game. There was nothing wrong with my conditioning methods. They had paid off too many times in the past. My problem was to get the right cocks, and when I got Icky from Mr. Middleton, I would be off to a good season. I finished the rest of the gin and went to bed.
As far back as 320 B.C. an old poet named Chanakya wrote that a man can learn four things from a cock: To fight, to get up early, to eat with his family, and to protect his spouse when she gets into trouble. I had learned how to fight and how to get up early, but I had never gotten along too well with my family and I didn't have any spouse to protect. Fighting was all very well, but getting up early was not the most desirable habit to have when living in a big city like Jacksonville.
The next morning I was up, dressed and shaved, and sitting in the lobby by five thirty. I bought a morning Times-Union, glanced at the headlines and then went out for breakfast because the hotel coffee shop didn't open until seven thirty. I lingered as long as I could over coffee, but it was still only six thirty when I returned to the hotel. I was too impatient just to sit around, and I soon left the dreary lobby and walked the early morning streets. The wind off the river was chilly and it felt good to be stirring about. A sickly sun rode the pale morning sky, but after an hour passed it began to get warm and promised to be a good day.
Promptly at eight I entered the Latham building to see if Doc Riordan had arrived at his office. The Latham building was an ancient red-brick structure of seven stories built in the early 1900s. Nothing had been done to it since. The entrance lobby was narrow, grimy and filled with trash blown in from the street. There was a crude, hand-lettered sign on the elevator stating that it was out of order. Doc's company was on the sixth floor.
The stairwell up was unlighted and without windows. I climbed the six flights only to discover that his office was closed. The office was two doors away from the far end of the hallway, and the frosted glass top half of the door had gold letters painted on it four inches high:
THE DIXIE PHARMACEUTICAL CO.
Dr. Onyx P. Riordan
PRESIDENT AND GENERAL MANGR.
I tried the door and found it locked. Rather than descend the stairs and then climb up again I leaned against the wall and smoked cigarettes until Doc showed up.
The wait was less than twenty minutes and I heard Doc huffing up the stairs long before I could see him. He entered the hail, red-faced, carrying a large cardboard container of coffee. The container was too hot for him to hold comfortably, and as he recovered his breath, he kept shifting it from one hand to the other as he fumbled with his key in the door lock.
“Come on in, Frank,” Doc said, as he opened the door. “Soon as I set this coffee on the desk I'll shake hands.”
I followed Doc into the tiny office, and we shook hands. Doc wiped his perspiring bald head and brow with a handkerchief and cursed angrily for two full minutes before he sat down behind his desk.
“I've told the superintendent before and I'm going to tell him one more time,” Doc said as he ran down, “and if he don't get that damned elevator fixed, I'm moving out! That's a fact, Frank, a fact!