Charlie messaged me in the morning, as I knew he would. Despite the thousand kilometers between Paris and Verona, he stirred my guilty conscience, even though I hadn’t felt guilty when I went to bed.
What did you get up to last night?
Cola had dragged me to the cinema with Cinzia, and along the way, we picked up her younger brother in Castel d’Azzuno. “This is Salvo,” she said as the young boy got into the back of Cola’s car. “But we call him Bianchi, and he doesn’t speak much English.”
Bianchi turned out to be eighteen, but his small size made him look much younger. Cola had been right; there was no doubt that he was beautiful, with a delicate face, inquisitive dark eyes, a dainty nose, and thick black hair. He nodded, sat beside me without saying a word, and put earbuds in to listen to music on his phone.
We drove to the UCI multiplex on Via Monte Amiata to see Caught Stealing, or as it’s known in Italian, Una Scomoda Circostanza, starring Austin Butler, whom I found both weird-looking and handsome at the same time.
Cola and Cinzia sat together while I was between Cinzia and her brother. I tried to make small talk with Bianchi, but the language barrier proved difficult, and we both fell into awkward silence before the movie started.
Caught Stealing had been dubbed into Italian, which put me at a disadvantage because I struggled to follow the narrative. Cola had suggested we go to a smaller cinema where it was being shown in its original form with subtitles, but I thought this would be unfair to them.
The tradition of dubbing English-speaking movies into Italian dates back to a time when most of the population was illiterate and struggled with subtitles. Mussolini’s government saw dubbing as an opportunity to control foreign content, and the rise of the industry with skilled voice actors has persisted ever since.
I cast furtive glances at Bianchi, who seemed distracted, disinterested, and perhaps even guarded. Once or twice, he looked my way and smiled with embarrassment, but for the most part, he looked away.
He was a beautiful boy, but Cola’s sly yet playful attempt at matchmaking was never going to work because of the age difference.
Afterwards, we went for coffee. Cola and Cinzia spoke in English, and Bianchi listened and smiled as though he was part of the conversation. There were fleeting glimpses of curiosity and connection. What had begun as a seemingly casual setup gradually revealed the possibility of a deeper attraction, or at least a moment of recognition between us.
“Shameless. He floats naked in the water, the light rippling over chest and stomach. His lips, as if caught between a breath and a moan, his hand loose at his side like he’s waiting to be grabbed. There’s nothing soft about it – just flesh, need, and the unspoken dare in his stillness. Every line built for touch, for heat, waiting to be claimed. The invitation to take what you want. The sight is blunt, undeniable: he wants to be used.”
Charlie had taken his art in a new direction. He was bored, disillusioned with paintings of landscapes, objects and street scenes. A flirtation with what he called ‘art contemporain’ had ended in frustration. “Circles, squares, solid colours, lines, zig-zags … they mean nothing to me!”
The first that I knew about this new path was when I returned home to find Levi, our former lodger, sprawled on the sofa in just his underwear. “It isn’t what it looks like,” he flushed. ”I’m only doing it as a favour.”
Charlie shouted from the bathroom. “I am ready now. The bathtub is full and my camera is ready.” I was bemused to say the least.
Charlie wandered into the room. “Ah, you are home, mon ami. I need the bathroom for thirty minutes while I photograph Levi.”
The Polish boy with the Yorkshire accent followed him along the corridor and into the brightly lit bathroom. With a certain amount of embarrassment he stepped into the bath. “Lay down, Levi, and put your head underwater. I am going to stand on both sides of the bath and take photos from above.”
I watched from the doorway and listened while Levi was told to take deep breaths and submerge himself. Then he had to raise his right arm, then his left, and then both of them together. All the time, Charlie was precariously balancing, taking shot after shot.
When they had finished, Levi stood up, looking satisfyingly toned, and dripping from head to toe. Charlie looked him up and down. “As I suspected, you have a little dick, but we cannot all be lucky. You can get dry now.”
“I feel stupid,” Levi told him, “and I haven’t brought any dry boxer shorts.” Charlie flicked through the images and appeared not to have heard him, so I went to a bedroom drawer and gave him a pair of mine to change into.
That night Charlie spent hours searching for the right photo. The next morning he visited a local print shop and had it blown up to the size of a small poster. He placed it on an artist’s easel and studied it. “I am going to use this photo to create my next painting,” he announced. “If it is successful then I am going to start painting beautiful men from now onwards.”
I reminded him that there had been a time when he would have considered Levi anything but beautiful. “That was the case,” he replied, “but I needed somebody that I knew who was willing to model for me, and when I have finished, I will make him appear extremely homoerotic which is something he is definitely not.”
Image: The Boy with the Black Dog – Charlie Marseilles
Ten o’clock in the morning and I hoped that I wasn’t too late. I stood on the terrace and looked upon the narrow street, the wait tense, every figure a possibility, every person making my pulse leap, until I remembered the black dog, and the disappointment set in.
I was in my hiding place, and he wouldn’t know that I was there, the anticipation laced with secrecy, maybe even guilt. I was invisible, while he was exposed for everyone to see. What would happen if he looked up? Would he even notice me? What if I wasn’t the only watcher?
The minutes ticked by and I hoped that he would appear, and when he did, it would seem like the world was holding its breath. I waited for the boy with the black dog.
The day started with a mystery that caused a problem. Charlie had done the laundry and I had been angry. It doesn’t matter how many times that you tell him to separate whites and colours, he refuses to do so. The result was that my white t-shirts came out pink yet again. When I challenged him about it, he sulked, and put the rest of the clothes away in silence.
And then we came to the black Calvin Klein briefs.
Charlie was putting them in my drawer and I pointed out that they didn’t belong to me. He held them between his fingers and examined them. “They are not mine either,” he decided. “They must be yours,” I replied. “They are definitely not mine.”
We stared at the underwear and waited for the other person to admit to owning them. But neither of us coughed up.
Charlie tossed them onto the bed.
“This poses a significant problem,” I decided. “If they don’t belong to either one of us, then whom do they belong to?”
“That is a very good question. Do they belong to someone who you have been sleeping with?”
“In your dreams,” I responded, but there was hesitancy in my voice. Charlie had the ability of making you feel guilty even when you were innocent, and this was one of those occasions. He pounced upon my uncertainty and decided that I had been sleeping with someone who had forgotten to take their underwear home with them.
“I can assure you that I haven’t slept with anyone. The only person that I’ve slept with is you, but even that’s debatable.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I’m just a bit upset because I know that they are not mine, nor are they anybody else’s that I know of, so the finger of suspicion points squarely at you. Have you been sleeping with somebody behind my back?”
Charlie rubbed his hands through his hair in desperation. “Do not be disgusting. I have not been sleeping with anybody.”
“Was it one of those American Mormon boys who came knocking at the door? Did one of them come back when I was out?” It was a cheap shot. But a few days before, they had come bright-eyed and eager to save our souls. I’d politely turned them down and said to Charlie that it was inconceivable that every Mormon boy appeared to be cute.
When Charlie was hurt, his French accent became more pronounced. “I believe it when you say that you know nothing about them, but you must also understand that I have nothing to do with them either.”
“But whose are they?”
“I have no idea. But maybe they belonged to Levi who left them behind when he moved out.”
“But that was weeks ago,” I said.
“I guess that there is no other explanation.”
And that was where we left it. Black Calvin Klein underwear unclaimed.
The tide is advancing and the boy and girl appear oblivious. I worry that they will be stranded on the rocks, but it seems that they don’t care. The sharp edges cause discomfort for the girl in the swimsuit as she crawls over them. The boy sits looking at his phone. She gets to where she wants to be and the boy starts filming. When she does a headstand, I realise that this is for Tik Tok. I hope that she loses her balance, falls, and that there will be lots of blood. But she completes the manoeuvre and goes back to where the boy is scrutinising the video that might make her famous.
I plot their escape route. There is no way up because there is a high wall built for William Rashleigh as the foundations for a marine villa. In recent times, the comedian Dawn French might have looked upon the boy and girl and thought the same as me, but she is long gone. There is only one way, and that is into the sea.
The boy takes his white t-shirt off. He wears a pair of long swim shorts and is pale and slender. He looks longingly into the sea, thrusts out his chest, and throws himself in, his black hair slick and wet, bobbing in the waves, and eventually swimming back to the rocks. If Dawn French was there, she might have shouted, “Get your shorts off skinny!” But, as I have said, she is gone.
All this time, the girl with the long blonde hair has been taking selfies, an obsession with likes and follows, and I decide that I don’t like her. Perhaps the boy took a swim to rid himself of the monotony and shallowness of it all. He will now have to pretend how wonderful her photos are.
They get dressed and gather up their belongings before jumping into the water and wading waist high towards the beach. I wish that she would stumble and fall beneath the waves. That would be very popular on Tik Tok.
Alessio returned last night. I woke to find him standing in front of the window with the full moon behind him that made him glow turquoise.
“My friend, I have so much to tell you.”
“Is that really you, Alessio? The thing is, you are dead.”
I sat up in bed. Everything seemed real yet I knew it must be a dream. Alessio looked different. It was definitely him but he looked older and well groomed.
“Of course I am dead. There was no way I would have survived falling from such a great height and lived.”
Alessio stepped into the room but still had that strange glow about him.
“Why are you a funny colour?”
“Ah,” he said, “it is the colour of oro and is quite normal. It fades after a while.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Relax my friend. Don’t be frightened. I have something exciting to say. When we were young boys we were taught that God created this beautiful planet that spins. But I have found out something remarkable. The earth that you see from space looks to be one planet, but everything is not as it appears. To our eyes it appears as one, but that is not the case because there are really three worlds superimposed over one other..”
“Alessio. Wherever it is you have come from, I see that there is an abundance of drugs for you to take.”
“Hear me out. God was a multi-tasker and didn’t create one world, but created three – the past, the present, and the future. He was a genius. The reason that the earth spins is because it allows the past, present and future to rotate together. Sometimes each of the worlds moves faster, sometimes slower, but each spins unknown to the other, but occasionally they slip into each other and voila, you end up where you aren’t supposed to be. I am testimony to that. Right now I’m in a controlled time slip. I am a ghost standing before you, and you appear as a ghost to me.
“The exciting thing is that you are in the present and when you die you will cross over, and without knowing it, you will be reborn into the past or the future. It’s a potluck where you end up. When I died I moved into the future where I grew up to be a wonderful scientist, part of a secret AI team that discovered this amazing shit, and right now I’m part of an experiment that is communicating with the past, or should that be the present? I might not remember anything when I return, but, so far so good, I know why I’m here, and came knowing nothing about you, but immediately remembered who you were and everything that happened between us. Bad boys always recognise bad boys.How are you, by the way?”
“It’s a lot to take in,” I stuttered. “Does that mean there isn’t a heaven? Or hell for that matter?”
“On the contrary my friend. Heaven is where you might perceive hell to be. Three lifetimes and we all go to heaven. It’s a place that no living person can ever go to, but tomorrow, when the sun is high in the sky, think about why it is that the sun is so hot. It is what is behind that fiery facade where the answer to your question lies. And, by the way, there is no hell, and if there is, we’ve yet to discover it.”
“This is bizarre,” I told him. “This is the weirdest dream I’ve ever had.”
“Think of it as a dream if you like.” He looked at his hand. “My oro is almost gone so I must return. But remember what I’ve told you, and if you care to tell anyone then I am sure that they will think you are quite mad. Goodbye Lucio. It has been good to see you again.”
Jaymz had been missing for weeks. One minute he was there, and the next he wasn’t. People hadn’t noticed, at least not to start with, but after a couple of days the void was unavoidable. It was then that people began to speculate.
Emily, with her spotty face, was the first to realise, because she was secretly in love with him, and thought that he might have taken up with a girl. Bradley, the boy who claimed to have the biggest dick, claimed that Jaymz had been arrested. Then there was sweet and innocent Olivia, who worried that he might be lying injured in a hospital bed. Dav, which was short for Davion, pulled himself away from his iPhone, and said that Jaymz was dead in a ditch. Conor reckoned that he was delirious with pneumonia. I didn’t say anything.
It was a credit to Jaymz that people came up with such outlandish reasons for his disappearance.
The last time anybody saw him was on a freezing cold Wednesday night. He climbed the railings beside the Lagon and stared at the twinkly lights on the other side. Then he turned around and told us about the time he jumped fully clothed into the blackness of the river. There hadn’t been a reason to do so but had seemed like a good thing to do.
We got into the back of Conor’s old Bedford Dormobile and drove up to Belfast Castle with spectacular views over the city. We sat on a wall drinking cheap cider until it started to snow, and Conor worried that the camper van might not make it back down the winding slope. Jaymz laughed and said that anything would get to the bottom of the hill in snow. It might not get down in one piece, but it would certainly get there.
The snow got heavier and while Bradley and Dav made snowballs, we huddled in the cold. Emily told Jaymz that she loved the way he spelt his name, which was exactly what he wanted to hear. That’s me, cool by nature, he’d swaggered, forgetting that he’d once told me that his granda had chosen the name after an obscure disco singer. Emily, with her black greasy hair and spots, almost wet her knickers because Jaymz had spoken to her.
Jaymz was plastered, but always able to make everyone else seem drunker than he was. A casual observer might not notice the difference between the extrovert and the booze fighter, but at times like this he could be unpredictable. Like the time he was drunk and climbed a tall oak tree to swing from its branches before jumping twenty feet to the ground. He should have broken a leg or something, but he didn’t. And when he scaled tall scaffolding on Agincourt Avenue and hung upside down by the legs, he might easily have slipped to his death. But nothing bad ever happened to him.
Despite his background, Jaymz was an enigma, larger than life, happy, and oozing confidence. He was never one for words, had little knowledge about anything, but what he lacked from his pitiful upbringing, he made up with composure that gave him film star appeal. There were plenty who said it was arrogance, and the police hated him for it, but it wasn’t hard to see why we adored him, and as you’ve probably guessed, worshipped the ground that he walked on.
But on that chilly night, he did something quite extraordinary. To our astonishment, he took off all his clothes and stood bollock naked. There were no inhibitions, the embarrassment was ours, and then he slowly fell backwards into the snow, and stared at the sky. He turned milky white, whiter than the snow around him, goose pimples on his arms and legs, and shivered uncontrollably. With a defiant look on his face, Jaymz said nothing at all.
We laughed and cheered, not at him, because whatever he did was okay with us. And then, after laying in the snow for ten minutes, he stood up like he was rising from the dead, his body dripping wet. Bradley, who now had every right to claim the world’s biggest dick, collected Jaymz’ sodden clothes and helped him dress. Jaymz didn’t say a word, but smirked, and looked like he’d fallen into a trance. Maybe he did catch pneumonia that night, because after he slipped away into the darkness, none of us had seen him since.
Days turned into weeks and when Jaymz didn’t appear, Dav and Olivia went to his house at Cliftonville to find him. Dav looked worried when he reported back. His parents hadn’t seen Jaymz either, or weren’t the least bit concerned about his disappearance. The old man had swigged from a can of beer and cussed Jaymz for not looking after his XL Bully. His mother had shrugged her shoulders and carried on watching The Chase, something lost on Dav because she wasn’t the brightest, and he believed that Jaymz’ level of thickness came from her.
I remembered a note that Jaymz once wrote and was shocked to see that the scrawl belonged to that of a small child. “The soul has beem givem its owm ears to hear thigs the mimd does not umderstamd.”
His slip into obscurity wasn’t surprising to me. There were clues on social media that the others hadn’t noticed. While their own accounts contained dozens of photos of Jaymz and his misdemeanours, they failed to realise that he posted very little himself. His Facebook page only contained a couple of images. There was nothing on Instagram, X, or Tik Tok, and for somebody as extroverted as Jaymz this was strange.
I picked up on this anomaly during the summer and spent weeks looking for reasons why this might be. That was how I was. If I saw something that intrigued me then I’d go to great lengths to find out more. It was an obsession that made me think that I might have a form of OCD.
At first, I tried to find out whether Jaymz had secret accounts, but that got me nowhere. Then I set up fake accounts in case he was blocking people that knew him. I suspected that he’d cottoned on to my sleuthing because for a while he seemed overly friendly, as if he was testing me, but I put that down to my paranoia.
With no success, I started following Jaymz like a stalker. Except that I didn’t see myself as one. He had no idea, and it wasn’t my intention to make him feel uncomfortable. If I had, then Jaymz would have punched me hard in the face.
Whenever Jaymz said that he was going home, I made excuses and said that I was going home too. With this pretence I would walk in the opposite direction and double back after him. The first few times I lost him, and this was because he wasn’t going home at all. I discovered this after almost bumping into him as he walked back into the city.
He sloped along Wellington Place before disappearing in the streets. It was always the same story. I followed him several times, but he gave me the slip.
Sometimes I asked questions to find out what it was that he wasn’t telling us, and hoped that he might let something slip, but he never did. He would laugh and give the same cretinous responses. What do you want to know? I like Fontaines D.C. I have a tattoo on my arse. I once shagged a donkey. I piss the bed when I’m drunk. I’m a Catholic bastard. Haha! Always a joke.
This consuming passion stopped when I realised that I had become his stalker after all. What had I been hoping to achieve? If there was a hidden side to him then maybe it was because I had created it.
After that night, Jaymz never reappeared and melted away with the snow. Emily often talked about him and couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing him again. Conor told her to forget him. He’d shown everyone that he had a small dick and had always been a waste. She looked like she might cry.
Life was dull, as if a light had been switched off, but nobody reported him missing. Not his parents. Not his older brother who was in prison. Not his big sister with ten screaming kids. I thought about him occasionally, believing that if I did, then he would think about us too. But whether he thought about us or not, it didn’t matter, because nothing happened, he had gone.
Dav repeated his comment about Jaymz being dead in a ditch, and I thought it might be true. There were those who didn’t like his cockiness, a need to be centre of attention, and he might have rubbed them up the wrong way. Especially the kids around the Waterworks who weren’t afraid to inflict the severest form of punishment. Every time they pulled a body from the Lagon I waited to see if it was Jaymz, but it never was.
Eventually, we decided that Dav was right, that Jaymz was dead, and chose to remember him as we did that night, naked in the snow, never growing old. And then, in years to come, with bad eyes, poor hearing, and stumbling with walking sticks, we’d still be able to laugh about him.
Jack Blanton. Image: Bob Hawkins/Remember Cliffside
I once went to a funeral and cried. It surprised everyone, not least Eleanor, because I wasn’t known for sentimentality. She gave me her handkerchief and I blubbered like a baby and everyone in church looked at me. On the way home, she said, “Joe, I didn’t realise that you knew Jack that well.”
There were a lot of things that my wife didn’t know about me. That’s the way things were. It was the last time we spoke about Jack Blanton.
***
It is now Christmas 1941, and that funeral was seven years ago. Eleanor and I are separated, and I only see the boys once a month. For the boys’ sake, she’s invited me to dinner, but a dark shadow threatens everybody’s celebrations because America is at war.
On Christmas Eve, I telephoned her and said that I wouldn’t be going.
At times like this, I needed a friend to turn to, somebody to share my fear of what lay ahead, because I knew that war would come for me. The only friend I ever had was Jack, and he’d left me in 1934.
I sat on the steps of Cliffside Elementary School, where both my boys attended, and thought how quiet and deserted it was at holiday time. It was a far cry from the schoolroom at the textile mill where Jack and I had met as young boys.
We came from respectable families and were inseparable. That surprised everyone because Jack had a God-abiding background whereas I hated religion.
I remembered the words of Pastor Hunnicut as we laid Jack to rest.
“Jack had a cheerful disposition and pleasant smile from which he greeted everyone, from childhood until his last breath, for he died with a smile of love and victory on his face.”
Kindness oozed out of him, and I never heard him say a bad word about anybody.
Jack was smart, cleverer than me, and he might have gone to college, but he was athletic and wanted to be a boxer instead. As kids, we filled an old cloth sack with horsehair and sand, then hung it from the beam of a ramshackle barn. I’d watch while Jack punched the heavy bag until his knuckles bled, prompting his father to buy him his first pair of boxing gloves.
An old pro at the gymnasium taught him how to fight properly, and by the time he turned eighteen he was in boxing tournaments.
I sat in his corner, rubbed his shoulders between bouts, and gave him words of encouragement. In victory, he smiled, and in defeat, he also smiled.
When there was nobody left to fight in Cliffside, we travelled to Charlotte for the big fights. He was twenty when he knocked down Buck Bridgers to win the decision, and the following year he floored Lloyd Parris after two rounds.
Jack was the squarest and cleanest shooter to climb through the ropes, and all the girls adored him, but he wasn’t interested, and too busy to notice that I had gone off the rails.
While he lived his clean-cut life, I had become addicted to illicit liquor that I obtained from a jailbird at Boiling Springs.
The night he mistakenly drank the ammonia used to purify water; I was getting drunk with Walt Parker in his backyard. I heard the next day that he’d only taken a sip, but the doctor said he had to pull out of his fight with Jim Swinson.
I went to see Jack, nursing a headache and racked with guilt, and told him that he needed to look after himself because he was my best friend. That was when he told me he’d met a girl and was going to marry her.
I said that it was a bad idea and promised to get straight if he’d reconsider, but he laughed and asked me to go to the wedding.
Jack married Juanita Crawford at the Baptist Parsonage in Avondale, and everyone was shocked because it had happened so quickly. They looked the perfect couple, Jack with his Italianate looks and slicked back hair, and Juanita with flowers in hers.
She was a sweet girl, but I resented the fact that she had stolen Jack from me.
A few weeks later I got hitched to Eleanor, who said I was worth a shot and thought she could help me mend my ways. It was a shotgun affair and nobody else was invited. Afterwards, I told Jack, and he said that I should take good care of her, but I knew that by not inviting him to the wedding, I had hurt him.
The following year, Jack fought ‘Kid’ Belk for the Championship of the Carolinas at the County Fairground. It was a close contest, but he was outpointed, and I remember the look of disappointment on his face, as if he had let everyone down.
I told him that I was proud of him and to focus on his next fight with ‘Kid’ Belk, but Jack was knocked out in the third round.
He changed after that, as if he knew that he was never going to be a great boxer, and when Juanita became pregnant, his priorities shifted to finding a good job. But these were bad times, with long unemployment lines, and work was even harder to find for a twenty-three-year-old.
This despondency might have sent Jack the same way as I had, but he never touched a drop of liquor. The Cliffside Baptist Church was his escape, getting involved with all sorts of activities, and attending prayers every Sunday and Wednesday.
He trained young boxers at the school gym and was excited when he discovered the next Carolina Carnera, a young boy called Walter ‘Bill’ Hamrick.
We went fishing like the old days, and talked about our childhood, the failures, and our hopes and dreams.
“Sometimes our disappointments turn out for the best. I see now that it was best that I did not continue boxing,” he said.
With no job, and the need to make ends meet, Jack joined Roosevelt’s Tree Army, and spent eighteen months planting trees and shrubs near Forest City.
Before he left, he grabbed me by the shoulders and looked me straight in the eyes. ”Joe, I love you like I do my brothers, Bill and Jim, and my sisters, Georgia, and Lillie-Bell. If ever you are in trouble, you must call me.”
Jack received a monthly salary of $30, of which $25 was sent to Juanita to help buy food, clothing, and fuel.
When he returned, his church connections landed him a job as supervisor at Cliffside Waterworks, as well as becoming the district milk inspector.
The last time I ever saw Jack, he showed me the Charlotte Observer and a photograph of his young daughter, Peggy Louise, who had been chosen as a Cliffside mascot. She smiled like her daddy did, and I knew that Jack had reason to be proud.
A few weeks later, I did something bad, and killed a man who stole a dollar off me. I punched him on the jaw, and followed it up, punch after punch, like Jack had shown me. I left him in an alleyway and got drunk with Walt who said he would give me an alibi.
That night, I went to see Jack because he would know what to do.
“He’s sleeping, Joe,” Juanita said, “He’s sick. He’s got real bad stomach pains.” I pleaded with her to let me see Jack, but she refused to wake him. “I’ll tell him you called as soon as he’s well again.”
Jack never did get better.
On Monday afternoon he was rushed to the Rutherford Hospital where doctors operated for appendicitis, but they said gangrene had already set in. He died a few hours later.
I went to offer my condolences to Juanita who was comforting Peggy Louise on the porch.
“He could never see the bad in you, Joe.”
She gave me Jack’s boxing gloves with their brown patina and cracked leather.
While I was leaving, she called after me.
“Why do good men have to die, Joe? Why isn’t it the bad ones?”
***
Back on the steps of the Elementary School, the light was fading, and snowflakes had started to fall.
I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket and pulled out a faded photograph. It was a photo of Jack, taken at a studio on Drug Store Street, a few days before his fight with Jerome Spangler. That would have been about 1930 when he was twenty three.
His fists are raised, eyes down, and I won’t forget that thick black hair that reminded people of a matinee idol.
He was wearing red boxing shorts that were tightened with string because he had been too skinny. On them, were the sewn-on letters ‘LB’ – Lawrence ‘Jack’ Blanton – that his mother had once cut from black cloth.
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 