The Bruiser Read Free

surgeon. He also began to write, mostly poetry, which was published in the area newspapers.
    Tully moved to Hollywood in 1912, when he began writing in earnest. His literary career took two distinct paths. He became one of the first reporters to cover Hollywood. As a freelancer, he was not constrained by the studios and wrote about Hollywood celebrities (including Charlie Chaplin, for whom he had worked) in ways that they did not always find agreeable. For these pieces, rather tame by current standards, he became known as the most-feared man in Hollywood—a title he relished. Less lucrative, but closer to his heart, were the books he wrote about his life on the roadand the American underclass. He also wrote an affectionate memoir of his childhood with his extended Irish family, as well as novels on prostitution and Hollywood and a travel book. While some of the more graphic books ran afoul of the censors, they were also embraced by critics, including H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan, and Rupert Hughes. Tully, Hughes wrote, “has fathered the school of hard-boiled writing so zealously cultivated by Ernest Hemingway and lesser luminaries.”
    Few Americans saw more of their country than Jim Tully. During his road years, 1901–1907, that view of everything from farms in Ohio and wheat fields in Nebraska to small towns in Mississippi and sprawling California orchards flashed by, usually framed by the steel sides of an open boxcar door. But there was another, less bucolic America of hobo jungles, railroad yards, and back alleys. And it was this America that young Tully called home. And a boy who lived in that America depended on his wits and, sometimes, his fists. After half-a-dozen years, he’d had enough. It was time to try life as a citizen. He left the road much as he’d begun: tentative and unsure of where he wanted to go. He’d first worked at a chain factory in St. Marys, and his only real plan when he arrived in Kent, Ohio, was to make his way to the chain factory and secure employment working hot links, the one job for which he might reasonably claim experience. Making chain would be a start, but he wanted more.
    He possessed few other skills that would gain him admission to 9–5 life. Having little formal education and being the son of Irish immigrant parents didn’t afford him the option of working in daddy’s firm or marryingthe banker’s daughter and being installed a vice president. Instead, he chose a path favored by immigrants and drifters. He would put on boxing gloves and enter the ring.
    Tully’s boxing training amounted to little more than sparring in a gym. As he later recalled in the third-person,
    Environment seemed bound to make him a pugilist. He fought so many brakemen, yeggs, and railroad detectives (he lumps them altogether) that he subconsciously became a trained fighter. Drinking rotgut whiskey, he battled galore in box cars and saloons. He learned the elemental lesson of the survival of the fittest. For in tramp life the struggle is primal and the weak are used as door mats while the strong are respected.
    It would be, if nothing else, (mostly) honest money.
    Tully had met other boxers, past, present, and future, in his travels. And as he embarked on his new profession, he recalled the advice he’d been given by one of them. The great lightweight champion, Joe Gans, advised Tully: “Don’t pay any attention to the fellow you fight—just act like he’s not in the world.” It proved difficult advice to follow for one without Gans’s skills, and Tully’s ring career never came close to that of the black legend. Still, for the next several years, Tully earned at least part of his living in the ring. His journeyman ring career ended in San Francisco in 1912.
    It was in the fourth round—I learned later.
    A right caught me. I was unconscious until the next afternoon.
    All events which preceded the fight, and everything which