Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

  “Anyways I was damned if I’d kiss ass just to be let out of there, I raised hell instead, and I was such a tough son of a bitch they couldn’t take me and sent me upstate to reform school, a work farm with cows and all that shit. You ever been in reform school?”

  “No sir.”

  “Well it wasn’t no picnic. I wasn’t a big guy, I was about your size, a skinny little punk, and there was a lot of bad boys there. I knew you gotta make your reputation early, where it matters, where the word can get around. So I was mean enough for ten. I didn’t take any shit. I looked for fights. I took on the biggest guys I could find. God help the fucker who messed with me, as one or two did to their regret. I even escaped from the goddamn place, it wasn’t hard, I went over the wire, and I was out in the bushes a day and a night before they caught me, and they added a couple of months for that, and I got poison ivy all the hell over me for good measure, and I was walking around all that time in calamine lotion like a mad zombie. When I finally got out they were glad to see me go, let me tell you. You in a gang?”

  “No sir.”

  “Well how you expect to get anywhere, how you expect to learn anything? I hire from gangs. That’s the training ground. You ever hear of the Frog Hollow gang?”

  “No sir.”

  “Jesus. That was the most famous of all the old Bronx gangs. What’s the matter with this generation? That was the gang of the first Dutch Schultz, don’t you know that? The toughest street fighter who ever lived. He’d bite your nose off. He’d pull your balls out by the root. My gang named me after him I got back from the reform. It was a honorary thing. It showed I’d done my time and gone through it, and come out of my training a son of a bitch in spades. So ever since that’s why I’m called the Dutchman.”

  I cleared my throat and looked out through the screen over the privet hedges to the water, where a small boat with a triangular white sail seemed to be sailing the shimmering mesh. “There are some gangs now,” I said, “but they are dumb fucking kids, mostly. I don’t want to pay for no one’s mistakes but my own. I think these days for the real training you got to go right to the top.”

  I held my breath. I didn’t dare look at him, I looked at my feet. I could feel his gaze on me. I could smell his cigar.

  “Hey Otto,” he said, “wake the hell up, you’re really missing something.”

  “Oh? That’s what you think,” Mr. Berman said from under his hat.

  It didn’t all happen at once but it happened night and day, there seemed to be no rule of time, no plan except the possible moment and whatever it was we drove to it in a car, and when you look out the window at the life you’re going through to get to this moment it takes on an odd cast, so that if the sun is shining it’s shining too brightly, or if it is night it is too black, all the organization of the world seems part of the conspiracy of your attention, and whatever is naturally around you becomes unnatural by the peculiarly absolute moral demand of what you are doing. This was my wish, I was training at the top. I remember for instance being dropped off at the corner of Broadway and Forty-ninth Street and told to hang around and keep my eyes open. That was all that was said, but it was momentous. One of the cars sped off and I didn’t see it again, the other, the one with Mr. Berman, kept coming around the block every few minutes, a single black squarish Chevrolet sedan inconspicuous in the traffic of black cars and the yellow checker cabs cruising for fares and the double-decker buses and streetcars, relatively empty, and neither Mickey the driver nor Mr. Berman looked at me as they passed, and I derived from that not to look particularly at them. I stood in the doorway of Jack Dempsey’s restaurant that had not yet opened for the day, it must have been nine or nine-thirty in the morning, and Broadway was fairly fresh, the newsstands and coconut-drink and hotdog stands were open and a couple of the stores that sold little lead Statues of Liberty but not much else. There was a second-floor dance studio across Forty-ninth Street and the big window was tilted open and someone was playing “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” on the piano. There is a local Broadway, a community of Broadway that you see in the morning before the penny arcades and bars open for the day, the people who live upstairs in the tenements above the movie marquees, who come out with their dogs on the leash to get the Racing Form and the Mirror and buy a bottle of milk. And the bakery delivery men who pull up and carry the racks of breads and big bags of rolls into the groceries, or the butcher trucks with the guys loading big raw sides of beef on their shoulders and dumping them on the roller chutes leading down to the basements underneath the restaurants. I kept watching and saw the street sweeper with his big broom and his summer white with the khaki-and-orange trim on his hat load up the horse manure and paper and crap and trash of a Broadway night on his wide-blade shovel and dump it all into the big ashcan on his two-wheel cart as if he was a housewife tidying up her kitchen. A while later the tanked water wagon came along Spraying the street so that it looked shining and fresh and almost simultaneously I saw the string of electric lights go on around the Loew’s State Theatre a few blocks below where Broadway ran into Seventh Avenue. In the sun it was not entirely possible to read the headlines riding in lights around the Times Building on Times Square. The black Chevrolet came around again and this time Mr. Berman glanced at me and I began to feel anxious, I wanted to see whatever it was I was supposed to see but the traffic was ordinary, not particularly heavy, and the people on the sidewalk were going about their business with no great urgency, a man in a suit and tie came along with a crate of apples on his shoulder and set it up on the corner with his APPLES 5¢ sign, the morning was warming up and I wondered if what I needed was in the window behind me where Jack Dempsey was shown in a big blowup photo of the ring in Manila with thousands watching, and there were other photos of the great man shaking hands with famous people, show people like Jimmy Durante and Fanny Brice and Rudy Vallee, but then in the reflection of the restaurant glass I saw the office building across the street, and I turned around to look, up on the fifth or sixth floor a man climbed out on a ledge with a pail and sponge and affixed his safety belt to the hooks imbedded in the brick and leaned back against the belt and began to make wide arcs with his soapy sponge on the window, and then I saw another man on another window ledge on the floor above him coming out to do the same thing. I watched these men washing the windows and then for some reason I knew this was what I was supposed to see, these window washers doing the morning’s work high above the street. And on the sidewalk below them was a sign, the kind that supports itself like an A, advising passersby that work was going on overhead and to take care, and it was the sign the window washers had set up in the name of their union. I had by now crossed Broadway and stood on the southwest corner of Forty-ninth Street and Seventh Avenue and I watched these guys working up there, two of them were on a scaffold hanging from the roof parapet maybe fifteen stories above the street and I saw this was the expedient for the extra large windows at the top that were too wide for a safety belt to span. And it was this scaffold with the two men and their sponges and pails and rags which suddenly lurched, the rope on one side snapping up into the air like a whip, and the two men flinging their arms back and spilling down the scaffold. One of them came down the side of the building wheeling. I don’t know if I shouted, or who else saw it happen or heard it, but while he was still several stories up, some seconds above his death, the whole street knew. The traffic was stopped as if every vehicle had been pulled up taut on the same string. There was a collective screech, a total apprehension of disaster on the part of every pedestrian for blocks around, as if we had all been aware all along of what was going on above our heads in the sky, so that the moment the composition was disturbed everyone knew instantly. Then the body at a point of flat and horizontal extension hit the roof of a car parked in front of the building and the sound it made was as a cannon going off, a terrible explosion of the force of bone and flesh, and what made me gasp was that he moved, the guy moved in that concavity of metal he had made, a sinuosity of bone-sma
shed inching, as if it was a worm there curling for a moment on the hot metal before even that degree of incredible life trembled out through the fingers.

  A cop on a horse was now galloping past me on Forty-ninth Street. The other window washer was still up there hanging from the unhinged end of the vertical scaffold and kicking his legs to find purchase where there was none, screaming up there as the platform swayed from side to side in the way least calculated to ensure his survival. What does a man have in his arms eight ten stories above the ground, what does he have in his fingers, in the muscles of his fingertips, what do we hold to in this world of unholy depth which presents for us its bottomless possibilities in air in water in the paved soil that opens up under us, cracking like a thunderstorm of the most specific density? Green-and-white police cars were converging from all directions. Up at Fifty-seventh Street a hook-and-ladder fire engine was turning into Broadway. I was breathless with the fascination of disaster.

  “Hey kid!”

  Behind me on Broadway was Mr. Berman’s Chevrolet, which was pulled up to the curb. The door opened. I ran back the short block and got in and slammed the door behind me and Mickey the driver took off. “Don’t gawk, kid, you leave that to hicks,” Mr. Berman said. He was put out with me. “You are not in the sightseeing business. You’re told to stay somewhere you stay there.”

  At this I forbore to look back out the window, which I would otherwise have done even knowing that the progress of the car down Broadway would have blocked the scene from my sight. But I felt the will in myself in not moving but sitting back silently and staring ahead.

  Mickey the driver had both hands on the wheel when he didn’t reach down to shift. If the wheel was a clock he held it at ten and two. He drove moderately but not slowly, he did not contend with the traffic but used it to his advantage without ever seeming to speed or cut anyone off. He did not try to make a changing light, or upon a light’s turning green to speed off with it. Mickey was the driver and that’s all he was, but that was everything; you knew watching him and feeling the movement of the car under you that there was a difference between driving a car and running it with the authority of a professional. I myself did not know how to drive, how could I, but I knew that Mickey would drive a car as calmly and safely at a hundred miles an hour as at thirty, that whatever he called upon a car to do it would do, and now with the vision in my mind of the helpless window washer falling to his death, Mickey’s competence stood in my mind as a silent rebuke in confirmation of Mr. Berman’s remark.

  I don’t think in all the time I knew him while he was alive I ever exchanged a word with Mickey. I think he was ashamed of his speech. His intelligence was all in his meaty hands and in his eyes, which you sometimes saw flick back for a professional second in the rearview mirror. They were light blue. He was totally hairless, with fat ridges at the back of his neck which I got to know well. His ears bulbed out in back. He had been a prizefighter who never got further than the preliminaries in club fights. His greatest distinction was having been TKO’d by Kid Chocolate in one of his earliest fights when the Kid was coming up, one night in the Jerome Arena just across the street from Yankee Stadium. Or so I had heard. I don’t know why but I wanted to cry for us all. Mickey drove us over to the West Side into some truck garage, and while Mr. Berman and I went across the street to a diner for coffee, the Chevrolet was exchanged for another car, which appeared with Mickey at the wheel maybe twenty minutes later. It was a Nash with totally different black-and-orange license plates. “Nobody dies who doesn’t sin,” Mr. Berman had said to me in the diner. “And since that covers everybody, it’s something we can all look forward to.” Then he tossed one of those little number-square games on the table for me to amuse myself with: the one with sixteen squares and fifteen little numbered tiles which you have to put in order by shoving them around until they’re in sequence. The point is you have only that one space to use to get everything around where it belongs; one space usually in the wrong place to put everything in the order in which it belongs.

  But as I say it was a kind of enlistment, I had walked in and signed up. And the first thing you learn is there are no ordinary rules of the night and day, there are just different kinds of light, granules of degree, and so no reason to have more or less to do in one than in another. The blackest quietest hour was only a kind of light.

  There was no attempt on anyone’s part to provide explanations for why things were being done and no one sought to justify anything. I knew better than to ask questions. What I did understand is that a strong ethic prevailed, all the normal umbrages and hurts were in operation, all the outraged sensibilities of justice, all the convictions of right and wrong, once you accepted the first pure inverted premise. But it was the premise I had to work on. I found it was easiest when Mr. Schultz talked to me; at these times for a few moments things were clear. I decided I had so far the idea of it but not the feeling, it was the feeling that made for the genius of the idea as anyone could tell just being in Mr. Schultz’s presence.

  In the meantime I could figure out things were being done at a level of intensity that perhaps had been anticipated in the quiet afternoons on the back porch of the City Island house. I will tell here about Mr. Schultz’s Embassy Club. It was a place he owned, one of his properties, and it was quite publicly visible with a fancy canopy with its name in scripted letters on East Fifty-sixth Street between Park and Lexington avenues. I knew all about nightclubs from the gossip columns, and the customers who went there and the fancy names some of them had, from high society, and how they all seemed to know each other, movie stars and actors and actresses coming in after work, and ball players and writers and senators, I knew there were sometimes floor shows with bands and chorus girls or black women who sang the blues, and I knew each place had bouncers for the unruly and the girls selling cigarettes on trays while they walked around in net stockings and cute little pillbox hats, I knew all that though I had never seen it.

  So I was excited when they sent me to work there as a busboy. Imagine me, a kid, working downtown in a nightclub! But in the week I worked there it was nothing like I expected. There was first of all not one single famous person I saw while I was there. There were people who came and ate and drank and listened to the little orchestra and danced, but they were unimportant. I knew that because they kept looking around for the important people they had come to see. Most nights the place was half empty except toward eleven o’clock when the floor show went on. The whole place was lit in blue light with banquettes around the walls and tables with blue tablecloths around a small dance floor, and a small stage with no curtain where the band played, not a great band, two saxophones and a trumpet and a piano and guitar and drums, and there was a hatcheck girl but no cigarette girls and no midnight reporters come to get dirt from the famous, no Walter Winchell or Damon Runyon, the place was dead, and it was dead because Mr. Schultz couldn’t show up there. He was the attraction. People liked to be where things happened or could happen. They liked power. The bartender stood behind the bar with his arms folded and yawned. At the worst possible table, by the door where it was drafty, every night two assistant United States attorneys sat with lime rickeys they did not touch and filled the ashtrays which I emptied conscientiously. They did not look at me. Nobody looked at me in my short maroon jacket and bow tie, I was so low-down as to be supposed legitimate. I was making good in the nightclub world and took a sort of scintillating pride in the fact that as a busboy I was beneath even the notice of the old-time waiters. That made me valuable. Because I had been put there by Mr. Berman with the usual admonition to keep my eyes open. And I did, and I learned what idiots people could make of themselves who came to nightclubs, and how they loved it if a bottle of champagne cost them twenty-five dollars, and the headwaiter gave them a table when they pressed a twenty-dollar bill in his hand though there were so many empty tables they could have asked for the one they wanted and he would have led them to it for nothing. It was a narrow room, an empty scen
e, and between sets the band stood out in the alley and every one of them was a viper, even the girl singer, and on the third or fourth night she turned her hand upside down to me and handed me a roach and I sucked on it like I had seen them doing and sipped it in, that harsh bitter tea, like a scatter of embers going down my throat, and of course I coughed and they laughed, but the laughter was kindly; except for the singer they were white musicians not much older than I was and I don’t know what they took me for, maybe someone working his way through college, and I let them think it, whatever it was, all I needed was a pair of Harold Lloyd horn-rim glasses and the act would have been perfect. In the kitchen though that was a different story, the chef there was a Negro who was in charge, he smoked cigarettes, the ashes of which dropped onto the steaks he was frying, and he had a cleaver with which he threatened waiters or underlings who offended him. He was a perpetually angry man who blew into flares of rage like the flames that flew up in the fat drippings. The only one who wasn’t afraid of him was the dishwasher, an old gray-haired Negro man with a limp who seemed to be able to stick his bare arms in tubs of scalding soapy water with no feeling. We were close because I brought him the dishes. He appreciated the way I scraped them. We were professionals together. You had to be careful in the kitchen because the floor was as greasy as a garage’s. Cockroaches were in leisurely residence on the wall almost as if they were stuck there, and the flypaper that hung from the light-bulb strings was black, and sometimes on the counters themselves a mouse or two scurried from one food bin to another. This was all behind the padded swinging doors with the oval windows of the blue-lit Embassy Club.

  Yet I stopped to listen to the girl singer when I could. She had a sweet thin voice and seemed to look far away when she sang. They would always get up to dance when she sang because the women liked her songs of loss and loneliness and loving men who didn’t love them back. The one I love belongs to somebody else. He means his tender songs for somebody else. She stood in front of the microphone and sang with very little gesture, perhaps because of all the tea she smoked, and every once in a while, at really inappropriate moments of the lyrics, she hiked up her strapless satin gown as if she was afraid even her listless gestures would expose her breasts.