Choynski

The young palliative-care doctor, a nice Jewish guy in glasses, prodded around my grandmother’s stomach and explained that the swelling wasn’t only a result of fluid. Some of it was disease. Disease had now infiltrated her kidneys and pancreas. He said that it was a very horrible disease, this disease, but everybody in the room—except my grandmother—already knew approximately how horrible it was. My grandmother said tank you to the doctor and repeated the word hoff several times. Her English wasn’t very good and I didn’t think the doctor’s Yiddish was good enough to understand that the word she incanted meant hope.

Outside, in the hall, the doctor said that it was useless for me to wait around. It could be a month or it could be less, but there was no sense in me cancelling my plane ticket. I thanked him and then returned to the living room to watch the second period of the hockey game. In the other room, I could hear my mother and aunt lying to my grandmother about what the doctor had said.

The same summer we were given the diagnosis, I had gone to the induction ceremony at the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York. This is where I was told to check in with Charley Davis, who was recovering from a stroke but still lived independently in his house in San Francisco. Not that anybody knew very much, they said, but if there was anyone who knew anything about Joe Choynski, that person would be Charley Davis.

Joe Choynski was being inducted into the Old Timers’ category that day. Chrysanthemum Joe, Little Joe, The Professor, The California Terror: he was known as the greatest heavyweight never to win a title by the handful of people who still remembered that he’d ever been around. He was America’s first great fighting Jew. He quoted Shakespeare in his correspondence. He was a friend to Negroes. Coolies on the San Francisco docks taught him to toughen his fists in pickle vats, which was why he never so much as chipped a bone—bare knuckle or gloved. Legend had it that he also invented the left hook.


From Los Angeles, I called to find out that my grandmother hadn’t had a proper stool in three days and that the enema produced only an insignificant pellet which took her an hour to pass. Afterwards, in her exhaustion, she wasn’t able to leave the bedroom until morning. I was told that my grandmother’s dentures—which I had personally dropped off before leaving town—could not be repaired and needed to be replaced, and that my aunt had agreed to pay whatever it cost since neither she nor anyone else was prepared to tell my grandmother that she wouldn’t be needing new teeth.

My aunt asked exactly where this God is, especially since my grandfather prays twice a day in synagogue. And my grandmother said that God will help, that the shark cartilage will help, that the naturopathic professor will help, that it just takes time before the good cells start fighting the bad cells inside there.


Charley Davis lived in South San Francisco not far from 3Com Park. Back when 3Com Park was Candlestick Park, Charley Davis covered the Giants and the fights for the San Francisco Chronicle. His house was half a mile from the highway and set high on a street of identical houses. Charley let me in and asked me to follow him into the living room. He was wearing blue pajamas under a faded brown robe. He dragged his left leg and his left arm hung as rigid as a penguin’s flipper. His house was covered in old fight posters displaying pictures of guys I recognized and would have traded lives with, even though they were already dead. As Charley inched into his armchair and tried to organize his limbs, I concentrated on a framed shot of the Johnson-Jeffries fight.

When he was settled, I sat down on the couch across from him and told him that I was stuck with my Choynski research. I pronounced the name the way he had taught me over the phone: Cohen-ski. He asked me if I figured I could identify Choynski in one of the pictures at the Johnson-Jeffries fight. Choynski had worked Jeffries’ corner for that Great White Hope fight in Reno. After I passed that test, we went through our collective Choynski information.

“He was a candy puller.”