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Popular Culture Review
athlete need to emulate such sports heroes. The ending of “The Palooka,”
though, is chillingly bitter, given the tenor of the Depression-ridden 1930s when
it most probably was written. When the Trainer asks the Kid, “How are you
feeling” as he waits for his fight, the fledgling boxer replies “slowly”: “Yes, I’m
feeling okay.” But the play ends with the damning politics of sports noise for
Williams—as “Roars continue. Blackout^^" signaling that the Kid’s hero-champ
is really a “palooka” being devoured by the cruel mob of fans, a fate also in
store for him if he stays in the fighting game. Williams’s title punches the lights
of desire out of the old and young fighter alike.
More than a decade after writing “The Palooka,” Williams dug up
another defeated fighter, Kilroy in Camino Real (1953). Named for the
ubiquitous and victorious GI, who in World War II scribbled “Kilroy was here”
on every wall and latrine in Europe, Williams’s Kilroy, “the young adventurer”
(369), is forced to retire from the ring because of a bad heart. His experiences in
the ring lead him to the Camino Real, a dystopia vsiiere love, honor, and
romance are vanquished in the absurd world run by the Generalissimo. Symbolic
of his loss of prestige as a sports hero, Kilroy is forced to wear a Patsy outfit and
wins “the Booby Prize,” Esmeralda, the Gypsy’s daughter, whom he is told will
have her virginity restored with the new full moon. Both betraying and betrayed
by his sport, Kilroy foolishly trades his “golden gloves” for a look at the
Gypsy’s daughter (563). Forfeiting the accolades due “the Champ,” Kilroy
descends to the ignominy of the Patsy, the grotesque antithesis of the manly
pugilist-hero. He is finally accosted by the piping streetcleaners, the hit men of
Camino Real, who are dispatched to take him away in a dustbin. But in a lastround attempt to recapture his glory days in the ring, Kilroy “swings"" at the
streetcleaners as they gather around him. “They circle about him out o f reach,
turning him by each o f their movements. The swings grow wilder like a boxer.
He falls to his knees still swinging and finally collapses fia t on his face"" (577).
Williams characteristically debunks the legendary mythos surrounding an
American sports hero, the Champ, by discrediting his superhuman athletic
abilities and, even more bitingly, turning a traditional sporting event of manly
bravery into a tragicomic brawl with absurd garbage men.
In the following Block of Camino, Kilroy makes a posthumous
appearance as the proud but ultimately defeated boxer. As a corpse on “a low
table on wheels"" where his “sheetedfigure"" is positioned for an autopsy (578),
Kilroy “stirs and pushes himself up"" after the pathology instructor dissects his
body, dislodging his golden heart in the anatomy. Seizing his heart, Kilroy
throws it “like a basketball to the Loan Shark,"" and then cries to Esmeralda,
“Doll! Behold this loot. I gave my golden heart,” as jewels and sequined gowns
are cast at his feet. But this is no garland of victory; it is a travesty of a sports
triumph. Kilroy has, sadly, sold out; the heroic fighter is reduced to a harlequin,
an anti-sports hero, seduced by a whore. Pounding on the Gypsy’s door, the only
thing the disgraced boxer receives is the slopjar that she hurls at him.