coll. - Buffalo Nickel

Buffalo Nickel

A Memoir

Floyd Salas

This book is made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Arte Pblico Press
University of Houston
4902 Gulf Fwy, Bldg 19, Rm 100
Houston, TX 77204-2004

Cover design by Mark Pin
Photograph by Bill Ashley

Salas, Floyd, 1931

Buffalo nickel / by Floyd Salas.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-55885-049-X

1. Salas, Floyd, 1931 Biography. 2. Novelists, American 20th centuryBiography. 3. Boxers (Sports)United StatesBiography. I. Title
PS3569.A459Z464 1992

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Second Printing, 1992
Copyright 1992 by Floyd Salas
Printed in the United States of America

Each tear is a crystal heart

Count them

Paper spots!

Damp!

Blurring print!

Streaking my thoughts!

But Ill spread them for you

Give the why

Why?

Because I ache in my guts

Because my intestines cramp with memory

And that memory is greased with brain and blood

And this the why

of that.

For my brother Eddy and my Dad and my brother Al

Buffalo Nickel

A Memoir

His big plaster leg took up the whole back seat and he held his crutches next to him. He was eleven and I was almost two. We were taking my brother Al home from the hospital, where he had been put after jumping headfirst off a thirty-foot water tower. I stared at him. He was a spectacular sight to me.

It was the deep depression of 1933. We lived in a mining town called Brighton and my father was lucky to have a job. He had a job because he was a hard worker, the best, a deputy sheriffs son who grew up on a ranch and knew how to get things done, like blow coal out of the tunnel walls with dynamite, so other men could load it.

I remember that tower. My oldest brother, Eddy, who was thirteen and an intellectual prodigy, swung me around by an arm and a leg up there and scared the hell out of me. I caught my breath, got dizzy and nauseous and saw a damp, dark spot on the earth beneath the water spout under the tower.

When Eddy came to bring Al home to get a spanking for selling one of Dads rabbits for a big jar of marbles, Al jumped headfirst from the tower. Thats my first memory of my brother Al. It has set the tone for the rest of his life, as I see it: tragic, but with a stubborn streak of survival in it that has denied defeat.

Oh, he was fun, though. He took me to my first movie when I was three. It was in a red brick building across the dirt alley from our yard in the small town of Lafayette, Colorado. He took me right down to the first row, where we sat looking up. I remember being astounded by the size of the big cowboys in front of me. And somebody behind us was shining a big flashlight down on them. I kept looking back and forth from it to the spinning wheels of the stagecoach. It astounded me. I couldnt figure it out. It was real and not real, another spectacular sight.

Next, I remember this little suburb in Denver called Elyria, where my father worked in a packing plant. Al took me to a house where somebody stuck a rake under a front porch and pulled out little warm puppies. Then, he taught me to shoot little green buds off a tree like spit wads. I was still three then. Then, I remember him when I was four and we lived in a red brick, two-story building on Curtis Street in Denver. We lived on the bottom floor.

My birth broke my mothers rheumatic heart, it is said. She had my little sister three years later, so she had to sleep in the afternoons or shed die. I remember her lying down in the bedroom. I had nothing to do and would wander around the house.

One day, I was rummaging around and I found the black suit with short pants and white silken shirt that my mother used to dress me in when we went somewhere. I liked it and put it on. Since I was dressed, I decided to go for a walk. I wandered a block down to Curtis Park, which was a big park with a swimming pool. I stayed there all afternoon, had all kinds of fun. I remember playing with these bigger boys who carried me and another little boy on their shoulders so we could wrestle and try to throw each other down. We were the arms, they were the legs. It was great fun.

Then I wandered to the other side of the park, where a woman in an alley told another woman I was the brother of Al Salas. He must have been thirteen at the time. I went back to the park and it must have gotten very late, almost dark already. Al appeared. He said he had been sent to find me and that I was going to get a beating when I got home. I can still see him lying down in the grass next to me: dark, wavy hair, strong-boned face, telling me very seriously that I better put a book under the back seat of my short pants so the whipping wouldnt hurt so much. I took him very seriously, but the book was too big and didnt fit. I did need it, though, because the next thing I knew, I was running around in a circle in the kitchen, hollering, while my mother held onto one of my hands and switched me. Even then my brother knew how to lighten the punishment you got for being too free.

Al put the first pair of boxing gloves on me then. Some cute little blond kid who lived next door was in the kitchen with me. So he taught the both of us how to box, or, rather, he put the gloves on us and had us slug it out on the linoleum floor. And we punched and punched at each other, getting all sweaty and red-faced. I remember it as a rainy day. Thats why we didnt go outside. He kept stopping us and pouring hot water on the gloves so we could hit harder. It made the gloves heavier and they splat more when we hit each other. I didnt know then how many fights he was going to get me into during the years to come.

He taught me to tie my shoes, sort of. I dont know how old I was, but I didnt go to school, not even kindergarten, so I had to be four or five. We were living on Welton Street. Our house was pretty and bigger than the previous one, more lighted, too. It must have been cold outside, because we were inside again, and again he was watching me and my little sister. I kept going up to him to get my shoe tied. It kept coming undone. I watched him as he did it. He was getting tired of tying it. I knew he was annoyed. But a little while later, it came untied again. So I sat down and tied it myself. I never asked him or anyone to tie my shoes again. He taught me that without even trying. Before it was over, hed teach me a lot of things without trying, some good, some bad.

He protected me, too. I had a little dog by the name of Trixie, a little terrier. She was very pretty, black with perfect markings. She had a natural white collar around her neck, white feet, a white star on the back of her head, white tip at her tail and a white throat. She started barking one day at some Mexican kids about ten or twelve years old who had come into the backyard and grabbed my bicycle. When she threatened them, one of them hit her in the nose with a Vaseline jar. She started yelping and ran back to the house across the big back yard. I yelled, They hurt Trixie!

Al ran out of the house and, with all the neighborhood kids, chased those guys down to the ballpark on the next block, where Al tackled the guy who had hit Trixie. He then held him down and let me hit him in the face for hurting my dog. I leaned over the big kid, who stared at me with wide eyes, and touched him with my little fist. Then, satisfied, my brother let him up. The kid ran off across the baseball field and never came back to our neighborhood. My brother was a hero to me that day, as he would be on many other days.