A Grain of Salt

If you could ignore the grime on the collar of his ruffled shirt, Pappy Jack’s middleweight dressed like Sugar Ray Robinson, which wasn’t something you saw every day in the Salt Lake City I remember. It was even whiter than it is now, and Pappy Jack’s middleweight enhanced his exotic image with long cars and a missing thumb, the one he lost in a prison brawl.

There had been a time when a shot at Sugar Ray, and a world championship, was practically his--all he had to do was go for the price down in Texas. But that turned out to be a lie, and the fight he threw turned his career into one too. So he went back to Salt Lake and did what he figured he had to do, until the cops knocked on Pappy Jack’s door at midnight.

Someone had cleaned out an appliance store, and the cops knew it was the middleweight Pappy Jack managed. They went to him first because he had the city’s underbelly wired when most of its Jell-O eaters didn’t even know it had one. Ran a poker game in the rear of a bar, did favors for politicians who craved plausible deniability, and never turned down a hard-luck case who showed up with his hand out.

The cops paid homage to Pappy Jack’s connections by saying they would give his middleweight a break: Return the swag and nobody goes to jail. A couple of nights later, Pappy Jack’s garage was full of TV sets and toaster ovens, and by morning they were back where they belonged. The middleweight didn’t come around much after that.

Pappy Jack’s son told me the story in junior high, and I count it as my introduction to the Salt Lake City you’ll never hear about during the Winter Olympics. Everything will glow with milk-fed purity, just the way the Mormon church and the Chamber of Commerce would have you think it always does. But 40-odd years ago, it was a lot more fun than that, and crazier, and sometimes meaner.

There were always young bucks going off to cowboy in Wyoming, and old coots playing billiards in T-shirts that didn’t quite cover the vast expanse of their stomachs. On the desert west of Salt Lake, you could watch dog fights in the dead of night. Some guys looked for drunken Ute Indians to fight at Johnny Cash concerts, probably because it was safer than taking on the Boone brothers when they were out of jail. The rest of us simply tried to stay in one piece every time a baseball umpire nicknamed “Nuts” insulted a stranger’s wife and started another donnybrook at the Indigo Lounge.

But all anybody wants to know upon learning that I grew up in Salt Lake is whether I’m Mormon. I tell them I couldn’t pass the physical.

That’s a joke. The truth is, I was Lutheran when I moved there from Los Angeles with my parents at 13 and a Lutheran skeptic regarding organized religion when I left for grad school at Northwestern nine years later. The church--no need to ask which church in Salt Lake--affected my life only by making the lunatic fringe that much more appealing. I investigated the fringe with an ecumenical group, Catholics, Presbyterians and one Greek Orthodox Serb. There was also a future Mormon bishop who one night consumed enough 3.2 beer to float him to the stage where he danced with Leroy & the Upsetters at a dive out by the airport. The boy had some moves.

Of course, it wasn’t that many years later that I vexed him by describing Salt Lake in print as a theocracy. His wife, a bishop’s daughter, salvaged our friendship by pointing out that a theocracy is exactly what Salt Lake is.

The next time I upset a native’s delicate sensibility, religion had nothing to do with it. I walked into a downtown bar the night before the 1979 NCAA championship basketball game, and from the darkness at a corner table, I heard an ominous voice say, “I saw what you wrote in the paper. You weren’t very funny.” It was G. Brown, a.k.a. Honey Bear, a wide load whose junior-high exploits as a candy-bar extortionist I had lovingly recounted. His motto: “A Big Hunk a day keeps G. Brown away.”

Fortunately for me, G. was in the mood for drinking, not pummeling old acquaintances, and by night’s end, we were working our way through the nicknames everybody seemed to have acquired in an attempt to be colorful: Bulldog, Featherhead, Moving Van, the Midnight Indian. There was even a 5-foot-3 Italian hard-nose who was known to at least one bar owner as the Tall Swede. And the Tall Swede, in turn, made me an honorary paisan by tacking an o on the end of my name and calling me Schuliano.

Of all the guys who wore nicknames, the one who stands tallest in my memory is Sheik Caputo, the son of a west side bootlegger, who swore he spent Prohibition stomping on grapes in the family bathtub.

“People thought I was wearing purple socks for years,” Sheik said.

He was a Union Pacific machinist and a semipro first baseman who became my neighbor, my American Legion baseball coach and my friend. He fed me my first slice of pepperoni, gave me my first chew of tobacco, and took me to my first go-go bar. His buddies from the railroad said one of the dancers was dying to meet him. Why he wanted me along, I couldn’t understand--I was underage and shyer than most--but there I was when the go-go girl descended from her cage and sashayed toward us. The next thing I knew, Sheik was leaning toward me and whispering, “Jeez, she oughta come around and scare my kids at Halloween.”

Sheik’s buddies, in full matchmaking mode, suggested that he buy her a drink.

“Sorry,” he told them as he pulled me out of my chair. “Got to get my catcher home. Big game tomorrow.”

But don’t let that misadventure give you the wrong impression of Salt Lake City’s women. It’s bad enough that Mark Twain, no fan of Mormons, wrote about them so unkindly. In my experience, they could be almost sinfully pretty, particularly when they had summer tans to set off their blond hair and blue eyes. And yet the girl I think about most as the Winter Olympics descend on Salt Lake is one who didn’t fit the stereotype, a willowy brunet who was a couple of years behind me in high school and did most of her communicating with her eyes and a mysterious smile.

A friend of mine’s kid brother, obviously as taken with this girl as I was, bumped into her in a hotel bar some years ago, and before the night was done, he had confessed that he’d always had a crush on her.

She looked at him evenly--no smile, no mystery--and said, “Your crush would cost you a lot of money now.”

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John Schulian is a former Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist and co-creator of TV’s “Xena: Warrior Princess.”