by Steve Rushin
He tells me about Paul Newman, whom he worked with on The Hustler in 1961, and the film’s costar, Jackie Gleason, who could shoot a little pool: “He was all right. I mean, he beat all those suckers at Toots Shor’s.” He talks about Minnesota Fats, his rival on those televised matches on Wide World of Sports that I watched on Saturday afternoons in Bloomington when Dad tired of whatever college football blowouts were on the other channels. We always rooted for Fats because he was from Minnesota, except that Mosconi tells me he wasn’t. “He was Rudolf Wanderone,” from New York City, and Willie did not enjoy his company in those televised exhibitions. “But my wife loved them,” he says. “She got all the money.”
By the time I hang up, my neck cramping from squeezing the handset between my ear and shoulder, every question on my handwritten list remains unasked, yet somehow answered. All I had to do was get him started, like a pull-string doll, then listen to him talk for an hour.
I take Mosconi’s voice, the stories of his childhood, the scene of him sitting in his theater seat on Broadway when the curtain rose on Abie’s Irish Rose, and sprinkle them throughout the piece I’ve already written for class. They’re yeast. They make the story rise. I write it up and seal it in an envelope addressed to Bob Brown c/o Sports Illustrated. Then I drop it into a mailbox on Wisconsin Avenue, a message in a bottle, tossed into a great big sea.
12.
We’ll Give You the World
Suddenly, improbably, I’m going to New York for the first time, over spring break, to visit Jim, who has an apartment for six weeks in Stuyvesant Town, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, paid for by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which is training him for a job in Southern California. This means flying by myself for the first time, and taking my first taxi, and converting almost all of my money into American Express traveler’s checks, per Dad’s manifold instructions, which he delivers in the grave tone of a father giving his son the sex talk, not that he ever has, to our mutual relief.
“When you get to LaGuardia,” he says, “go straight to the cab stand. Don’t listen to anybody at Baggage Claim who offers you a ride. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Dad, for God’s sake…”
“Then tell the cabdriver to take Crescent to the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. Got that?”
“For the tenth time, yes.”
“If he tells you the Triborough is faster,” Dad says, “tell him you don’t care. Tell him Crescent to the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge.”
“Okay!”
“It’s cheaper.”
“So you said!”
I have forty bucks in cash, a hundred dollars in American Express traveler’s checks, and Dad’s folding map of the five boroughs, on which he has circled in ballpoint pen the intersection of 52nd Street and First Avenue, location of his favorite restaurant, Billy’s, which has served beef and creamed spinach to New Yorkers since 1870, and pork chops to traveling magnetic-tape salesmen since 1970.
“Get the pork chops,” Dad insists. “Best pork chops in New York.” This is a man who has found the best pork chop in Jerusalem, a man who once said, “You can’t undercook a pork chop” (you can), a man for whom the pork chop is the highest human art form: above music and literature and everything but the Cadillac Seville. As he describes the porcine succulence of Billy’s on First Avenue, that checkered-tablecloth temple of grilled meats, I realize that this is the sex talk he never gave me. Except that it’s not about the birds and the bees or the flowers and the trees. It’s about a good pork chop and airplane etiquette (never recline) and dry cleaning (hangers not boxes) and how to calculate a 15 percent tip and how to buy Broadway theater tickets (at a 50 percent discount, from the TKTS booth in Times Square) and how to thwart pickpockets (wallet in front pocket) and how to hail a cab (in the street, downstream from the competition, waving madly like you’re sending the Lusitania out of port).
Armed with this knowledge, I approach LaGuardia on March 5, 1987, sharking in over Shea Stadium, home of the defending world champion New York Mets. I have seen and heard these planes on TV, buzzing Shea and U.S. Open tennis matches, and now I am on one, already contributing to the noise of the city, already annoying someone down there, even before Northwest Orient Airlines delivers me to the terminal.
Following the crowd to Baggage Claim and Ground Transportation, I descend the escalator to a baying crowd of dour men whisper-shouting, “Need a ride?” A gaunt bearded man who smells of pine-tree air freshener seizes my softsided suitcase by the handle, perp-walks me past the long taxi line, and throws my luggage into the trunk of his 1974 Monte Carlo. He sees me into the fetid back seat and drives away. Only when we’re in motion and he asks “Where to?” can I conclude with any confidence that I’ve not been abducted.
“Fourteenth Street and First Avenue,” I say. “Take Crescent to the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge.”
“Triborough much faster,” he says.
“Fine,” I say.
Through Queens, thinking, This is the home of Archie Bunker, 704 Hauser Street in Astoria. My fingers are crossed that we’ll pass through Brooklyn and see the sign—WELCOME TO BROOKLYN 4TH LARGEST CITY IN AMERICA—that welcomed back Kotter in Welcome Back, Kotter. My knowledge of New York City geography comes almost entirely from TV, from the reruns that still air in Minnesota of Car 54, Where Are You?, whose theme song I have in my head right now: “There’s a holdup in the Bronx, Brooklyn’s broken out in fights, there’s a traffic jam in Harlem that’s backed up to Jackson Heights…” Those after-school reruns were twinned with repeats of The Patty Duke Show, in whose theme “Patty’s only seen the sights a girl can see from Brooklyn Heights…”
And then it appears through the window of the Monte Carlo, the Honeymooners skyline of Manhattan.
Climbing onto the Triborough, the theme to Taxi plays in my head, though the span in those credits was the 59th Street Bridge and I’m not technically in a taxi but an unlicensed, uninsured, and mostly unupholstered sedan driven by a man whose camel-colored Members Only jacket makes me wonder: Who was denied membership?
The Monte Carlo alights in Manhattan. Southbound on the FDR. On the East Side, site of George Jefferson’s “dee-luxe apartment in the sky-y-y.” Past the 59th Street Bridge, and I’m singing Simon & Garfunkel: “Hello, lamppost, whatcha knowin’…” The traffic is mad. At regular intervals, the driver blows his horn into the void, as if testing it. The radio ratchets up the tension, pounding out a frenzied nightmare soundtrack beneath the Voice of God, who gravely intones, “1010 WINS. You give us twenty-two minutes, we’ll give you the world.” There follows a litany of news stories involving rescued babies, arrested bankers, violent lovers, and a hard-luck man who tore up his winning lottery ticket. The traffic report makes liberal use of the words “standstill,” “backup,” and “bottleneck” at places that seem to be encrypted, a secret code to the city’s drivers: Throgs Neck, Tappan Zee, BQE, GWB, LIE.
The Monte Carlo lurches to a stop on First Avenue, across from a vast complex of brown buildings. “Stuy Town,” says the driver.
“What do I owe you?”
Dad insisted a cab ride via Crescent should cost no more than twenty bucks.
“Thirty,” says Members Only.
“Does that include tip?” I ask.
He looks at me in the rearview mirror. I can only see his eyes. It’s like he’s looking at me through the food slot in the solid door of a solitary confinement cell, but the brows have gone up in the middle, like a parting drawbridge, an expression I take to mean: Is this kid shitting me?
“A tip would be nice,” he replies.
“Do you take American Express traveler’s checks?” I ask. Dad has assured me that they’re better than cash, accepted everywhere, a kind of universal currency, the Esperanto of legal tender.
“I take cash,” he says.
We’re idling in front of a joint called Pete’s-a-Place. I admire the cheap wordplay and pull two twenty-dollar bills out of my Velcro wallet.
He clai
ms not to have change. I think he’s inviting me to jump out of the Monte Carlo and jauntily say, “Keep it!” But any customer capable of such largesse would not be riding in this man’s Monte Carlo, and he knows it. So he abandons the idling car and runs in to Pete’s-a-Place to break my twenty. He emerges with a ten, two fives, and a half-eaten slice on a paper plate. I give him thirty-five bucks and he pops the trunk, releasing my suitcase and me into the wild.
For three days I walk, until my feet are tender and my bladder is cast-iron. I walk from 14th and First to 50th and Sixth. On one corner is 30 Rockefeller Center, the GE Building, where I might see Letterman lean out a window with his bullhorn to mock Bryant Gumbel. On the opposite corner is Radio City: the Pretenders are there on the 31st, according to the marquee, but I’m only thinking of Steely Dan, “stompin’ on the avenue by Radio City, baby.” On the corner opposite that is the Time & Life Building, whose address—1271 Avenue of the Americas—I’ve committed to memory. I stand below this forty-eight-story temple to magazine journalism, fabled home of Time and Life, but not the home of Time Life Books, whose twelve-volume history of The Old West freaked me out in junior high whenever its epic two-minute infomercial aired. In volume one of The Old West, called The Great Chiefs, “you’ll look into the eyes of Sitting Bull, the man who destroyed Custer,” promised the ominous narrator, as the camera zoomed in on the chilling eyes of the Lakota chief. Eight weeks later, the lucky reader would receive “The Settlers, battling savage elements and bloodthirsty war parties” and—as the illustrations implied—tales of the Donner Party. Coming, as it did, as a jarring intrusion in the middle of The Benny Hill Show, The Old West promised to send me to bed dreaming of cannibalism and frostbite.
But that’s not all, as they say in this kind of commercial. “They’re all here,” the narrator said with a leer, listing every hero and scoundrel of the American frontier—“in big handsome books with the look and feel of hand-tooled saddle leather.” How I longed for those handsome volumes, suitable for reading or throwing over the back of an Appaloosa. “You’ll meet the gunfighters,” went the line we all quoted in school the next day, “men like John Wesley Hardin, so mean he once shot a man just for snorin’.”
Above all, of course, the Time & Life Building looming above me now is home to Sports Illustrated. Unlike the rest of Manhattan, the pavement I stand on is done in alternating waves of gray and white terrazzo. The tiles mimic—or so I’ve read—the sidewalks at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, a nod to our location on Avenue of the Americas. But I’m not looking down at the tiles, I’m looking up, to the eighteenth floor, familiar from my correspondence with Alexander Wolff and Bob Brown, in whose office up there—my eyes follow the vertical limestone facade until I’ve counted eighteen floors—my unsolicited manuscript sits under what I can only imagine is a Kilimanjaro of similar submissions. Even from down here, I can practically see it—or at least see the folly of having sent it. The vanity, the hubris—the chutzpah, to use a word that sounds like New York. In my apartment lobby in Milwaukee, I checked the mailbox every day to see if Mr. Brown had replied to my revised Willie Mosconi story. I see now, standing in a sea of people in Rockefeller Center, beneath this monument to magazines and midcentury modernism, that Sports Illustrated is doing just fine without me.
Jim’s alma mater, Providence College, is playing in the Big East basketball tournament at Madison Square Garden, and I’m meeting him there. “MSG” is “the world’s most famous arena,” even more famous than the Met Center in Bloomington, for this is not just the home of the New York Knicks and Rangers but also of singular spectacles like the Ali–Frazier Fight of the Century, the Concert for Bangladesh with Bob Dylan and half the Beatles, and Led Zeppelin’s concert film The Song Remains the Same. Watching college basketball there, I can’t help but see a silk-scarved Mick Jagger chicken-walking across a stage circa 1972. But mainly what I see are the courtside tables known as Press Row, preserve of New York sportswriters real and fictional, Red Smith to Oscar Madison. Madison Square Garden is a dump, but up here beneath the rafters in the notorious Blue Seats—so called for their upholstery but also the beer-fueled profanity of their drunken occupants—that is part of the charm.
In New York, dumps are temples. Anger is joy. Graffiti is art. The city’s peculiar aroma—bagged garbage and straphanger BO—is a breath of fresh air. New York City will have 2,016 murders this year—nearly six a day, every day, without a holiday. Times Square marquees advertise NYMPHOID DREAMS and EROTIC LUST and PORNO HOOKERS. Volcanic steam issues from every manhole cover: the city is literally seething.
But walk a little farther up Broadway, to the Upper West Side, and kids sit on Sesame Street stoops. A few blocks east is Central Park, where Oscar and Felix do a little dance in the opening credits of The Odd Couple. New York is at once foreign and familiar, both Oz and Kansas.
In three days, I develop a routine. I never eat at Billy’s, taking all my meals instead at a pizza place, including—but not limited to—Pete’s-a-Place. There are so many joints to choose from—Ray’s, Famous Ray’s, Original Ray’s, Original Famous Ray’s, and Famous Original Ray’s—an array of Ray’s, none of them affiliated, in whose sweltering premises I always get two plain slices before stopping at Smiler’s Deli for two Coors Lights. Two slices, two Silver Bullets. I take them back to Stuy Town, as I’ve learned to call it, fall onto the sleeper sofa, and dine in front of the TV, with its own buffet of cable channels, one hundred offerings under glass, like the sneeze-guarded trays in the countless Korean delis I’ve passed.
Lights out, recumbent in my fold-out bed, still buzzing from the day, the sirens, horns, car alarms, and sighing steam brakes of the sanitation trucks rendering sleep unlikely, I flip through the muted channels, pausing at channel 35, which is airing an otherwise conventional talk show in which the host and guests are all naked. This is public-access television in New York. None of the participants is attractive, fit, young, or sane. The harsh lighting throws into sharp relief the guests’ appendectomy scars and exit wounds. There is nothing remotely titillating about the program, though lying here in the dark I do idly hope that the sofa on set has been Scotchgarded with patented technology from 3M to safeguard against stains.
Every commercial on channel 35 is for an escort service, each catering to a specific clientele, including one whose telephone number is 555-PEEE. “The extra E,” purrs the voice-over, “is for extra pee.”
In the next show, an enraged man flips off the camera while excoriating everyone and everything—the phone company, his dry cleaner, the weather—that failed him this week. He’s identified as the editor of Screw magazine, which I take to be a trade publication for handymen, available at the checkout counter at Hardware Hank, until he begins reviewing X-rated movies in straight-faced homage to Siskel and Ebert.
A woman in a crocheted bikini interviews strippers and adult-film stars, all of whom are also clothed. Each show on channel 35 is somehow less interesting than the last. There are commercials for phone-sex hotlines that are like listening to golf on the radio. And more commercials featuring the kind of nudity you avoid in a locker room.
Bathed in the blue light of the Sony Trinitron, the Lower East Side thrumming outside my window, I recall my unsuccessful efforts to find a split second of nudity when cable came to my basement in Bloomington. There, it was scrambled. Here, I long for a scrambler. I feel like a farmer who prayed for rain in a drought only to see his crops washed away by a monsoon.
A curious phrase keeps presenting itself in the summer of ’87, my last in Bloomington before I graduate next spring and enter what Mom and Dad and even my friends have started to call “the real world,” as if everything up to and including now has been a fantasy. The real world? It seems to me that the foregoing twenty years have passed in a very real environment of pressures and responsibilities: lawns that needed mowing, corn that required shucking, math tests that wouldn’t take themselves. “Is this the real life?” I hear Freddie Mercury asking. “I
s this just fantasy?”
What horrors could real life hold if the fantasy requires second graders to unburden themselves of sins in a confessional, and to sing “We Go Together” from Grease while jazz-handing onstage with their seventh-grade classmates, each of us wearing matching gingham shirts? “The real world” does not intimidate me when I’ve already been exposed—in eighth grade!—to three words more mortifying than any others: mandatory square dancing.
No, I’ve experienced the real life and would now like to try the opposite. I have a fantasy about getting paid to watch games, and write about them. Failing that, I’ll work in “the real world.” Doing what, I haven’t a clue.
Tom has graduated from Iowa State and moved to Chicago, into an apartment within walking distance to (and stumbling distance from) Wrigley Field, where the Cubs still play eighty-one day games that somehow don’t conflict with his new job at Metropolitan Life.
All my friends are now twenty-one. We can go wherever we want—to O’Gara’s in Saint Paul or the Green Mill in Minneapolis or the Sports Page in Bloomington, though all those joints we used to pass on the Strip in Dr. McCollow’s powder-blue Bonneville look, like the Bonneville itself, of another time. We still go to White Castle at one o’clock in the morning, but the talk there is less of infinite possibilities than of specific job prospects, the narrowing field of choices. We’ve reached that fork in Milton Bradley’s Game of Life when you’re required to choose a path that will lead inexorably to Millionaire Acres or the Poor Farm, one or the other, life as a zero-sum game.
