Joey Without the Gold

You know him as Joey Barnum, self-proclaimed bail bondsman to the stars, a brash, colorful, joke-telling guy with a gold and diamond boxing glove pendant hanging from a chain around his neck.

Maybe you’ve seen him on television, his shirt unbuttoned halfway to his navel, only five pounds heavier than when he was a lightweight contender a lifetime ago.

Joey is on the tube a lot these days because he’s suing Sylvester Stallone for an undetermined amount of money, claiming his story is the basis for “Rocky V” and wanting a piece of the action.

He’s a familiar figure at Matteo’s and Dal Rae and some of the other better restaurants around town, looking good in his $800 snakeskin boots, a $3,500 Rolex gleaming in the soft lights.

“I’m doing all right,” Joey will say, laying a couple of jokes on you, picking up the tab for food and drinks, handing out gold-plated boxing-glove paperweights with his name etched across the back.

He’s all glitter and hallelujah, if you know what I mean, dancing around a ring with hands thrust upward, the quintessential winner, everybody’s pal.

Then why, you’re asking, are there tears in the eyes of the Good-Time Guy?

Because there’s a Joey Barnum you don’t know, a guy without the gold, sitting alone in the kitchen of his home, saying goodby over and over again to a woman he’s loved for 46 years.

Joey, sans flash, is grieving over a wife he lost not to death, but to a sickness he considers almost as bad. Esther Barnum disappeared into the vast expanse of her own soul last week with Alzheimer’s disease.

It’s been progressing for the last 10 years, Joey told me the other day, and it finally got to the point where he couldn’t handle her anymore. She was becoming violent and wandering away. His daughters convinced him it was time to put her in a nursing home.

So now Joey, the guy who loves crowds, is alone in the house where he and Esther lived for 28 years, where they raised their three girls, where memories lurk beyond perception like the forgotten laughter of children.

He’s a guy standing in the center of a boxing ring with everybody gone and the lights out.

“Can you imagine sleeping next to the same woman for 46 years and all of the sudden she’s not there?” he asked.

He was hunched over a cup of coffee at his kitchen table, bare-chested, without shoes, wearing only shorts. No gold hung around his neck, no Rolex flashed his logo.

Joey, at 70, looked like a frightened kid.

“It’s the first time we’ve ever been apart,” he said in a bewildered tone. “I still can’t believe she’s gone. But, you know, it was getting so she couldn’t dress or feed herself. I was her baby-sitter.”

Guilt hangs over Joey like a dark cloud. He keeps asking himself why he put her in the home, for her sake or his? The pain is deep.

It was especially so because he was due to see her that afternoon. He hadn’t seen her since she had been confined, because the nursing staff wanted a week of adjustment for Esther without family.

Joey shook his head. “It almost feels like I’ll be meeting her again for the first time.”

He was working at Lockheed and boxing as the Lockheed Bomber when he met Esther Lucero in 1944. He fell in love with her at first sight, Joey says, and hauls out a color photograph of Esther at 23 to show why.

A dark-eyed beauty looks out from the silver frame like a face at a window, a pensive expression emulsified on film. Was there something there that hinted at her future? Something in the look, the eyes, the tilt of her head?

Joey studied the photograph for a long time and then said, “She was proud and gentle and hated embarrassing moments. I gave her many. I was the braggart, the noisy one. She was quiet, almost shy.”

He thought about that for a moment. “Now there’s no one to laugh at my jokes, no one to tell me to shut up when I’m talking too much, no one to tell me to button up my shirt.”

These things are important to Joey, a check on his flamboyance, a tempering of his bombast.

“After 200 fights,” he said, “I’m the one who should have lost his faculties. Why did it have to happen to poor Esther?”

He got dressed. It was time to visit his wife. The gold chain was on again and the shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest.

“You know,” he said, pausing at the doorway, “one of the things she did was hide her purse and forget where. I’d spend an hour and a half searching for it every day, and she’d keep asking, ‘Where’s my purse, where’s my purse?’ One day I got tired of it and hid it away from her. Then I forgot where.”

He tries a laugh. It fades. He shrugs and leaves.

Joey saw Esther later that day. It was a loving, tearful reunion. The first thing she did was button up his shirt.