Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  Exactly one week later Jamsie was sitting with Ara in the cab late one night listening to the Louis-Schmelling fight. As the fight reached its climax, Ara’s face became more and more contorted. In the last few moments leading up to Joe Louis’ victory, Jamsie saw on his father’s face a very intense look which was quickly developing into that “funny look.” There was, again, something unhuman about it; and he could not catch sight of any trait which he had always associated with his father’s beloved face. With each of Louis’ blows to Schmelling, and as the voice of the announcer got higher and more excited, the “look” became more apparent on Ara’s face. With the gong and Louis’ victory, the tension broke. The strange look passed quickly, and Ara became normal and composed again. But Jamsie could not forget the incident.

  As time passed, his fear of the “look” began to lessen, but his curiosity was greater. What was that “look”? And how was it that he had seen it at the ball game and then again on his own father’s face, blotting out the kindness and love Jamsie had known there all his life up to that point? And what connection was there between all that and the “look” or “funny-lookin’ face” he used to see as a child?

  Around this time the family reached a low in its fortunes and well-being. Ara was developing a serious drinking problem, and the more he drank, the less money he brought home. Lydia, at first frantic about their needs, finally became morose and gathered into herself. Her young son was beginning to grow up. She began to feel alienated from him and Ara.

  Jamsie had already been hired as a pageboy by NBC. He left school to take the position, partly in order to bring in more money to his home, partly with the intention of pursuing a career in radio. In the early days of radio, NBC hired young men as pageboys for a two-year apprenticeship, then graduated them to guides, and afterward trained them in some branch of the flourishing radio business.

  Things went from bad to worse for the family. There was no longer enough food in the house. Lydia was always in arrears with the rent. And, unknown to Jamsie but with Ara’s consent, Lydia made her decision. Jamsie found out about it late one night in March when he returned from work at about 11:00 P.M.

  At home, to his surprise, he found his mother dressed in her best clothes. Her face was heavily made up. She was sitting in the living room gazing silently out the window into the night. When he came in, she did not turn around or say a word to him. But he knew she had something to tell him. As he waited, his eye was drawn to the old icon hanging on the wall behind Lydia. She had draped a black cloth over it. He looked from the ikon to his mother and back again several times before he understood that she was going to become one of the prostitutes he had seen his father introducing to clients.

  Lydia stood up then, as if she had heard him thinking. She knew he had realized what was happening. “I’ll be late, Jamsie. Don’t wait up for me.” He said nothing.

  When she had gone, he sat down and remained there thinking for about two hours. He knew without a doubt what his mother had in mind. It was written all over her. But there was something else he now knew: although he was alone as far as his mother and father were concerned, he had the strangest feeling that he was in someone else’s company. Finally he looked around the living room slowly and then through the window at the city.

  When he went to bed, he still felt deserted by his parents, but he was nursing some secret which he did not yet understand.

  Lydia became one of about 5,000 prostitutes in New York City. After a few weeks of lone-wolfing, she got herself put on the calling list of a parlor house in the West 40s. Jamsie got to know her routine. She slept during the day, rising about 5:00 P.M. If by 10:00 P.M. there were no calls for her from her madam, she went out for the evening. She worked Fifth and Madison Avenues between 43rd and 56th Streets. She would stop at the better bars, do some over obvious window-shopping, always on the lookout for clients. Sometimes she would give one of her clients a call. She worked this way until dawn. Then she returned home to sleep.

  After a couple of months she became a member of Polly Adler’s parlor house on Central Park West. By that time, too, she had established her own list of personal clients whom she called regularly. When Polly Adler got into trouble with the authorities, Lydia simply transferred her loyalties to another madam in the West 50s.

  As Jamsie got up each morning and looked in at his mother before he left, he found that over the months the expression on her face was changing. Instead of the look he had always seen there, he might see various traits of that “funny-lookin’ face” of his childhood terrors. But now there was no terror. Rather, he began to feel a strange kinship with the look.

  With the passage of time, Lydia noticed the difference in Jamsie’s reaction to her, and they established a new respect for each other.

  Ara, in the meantime, still driving for Burmalee System, Inc., had tried to move in as a steerer for crap games in the 49th Street and Broadway area. But the territory was already controlled, and the incumbents let him know in no uncertain terms that there was no room for him. Then he went deep into the numbers racket and illegal horse betting. In those times, about one million illegal bets were placed each day in New York. There was money to be made. As a numbers agent, he got ten percent of the take on each bet handed over to the collector. In time he himself became a collector, delivering bets to the central “policy” bank.

  Finally Ara found a source of easy money in drug traffic. There were between 20,000 and 25,000 heroin addicts in New York of the 1930s; and opium dens flourished on Mott and Pell Streets, as well as in Harlem, Times Square, and San Juan Hill. Diluted heroin was sold at $16 to $20 an ounce. A “toy,” or small tin box of opium, sold for about $10 on the street. Reefers fetched 50c each, or two for 25c in Harlem.

  In the beginning Ara merely bought reefers in Harlem which he sold at a profit downtown. Then he became a runner, transporting the little packets strapped beneath his armpits. There were times during these months when Ara—and less frequently Lydia—were so changed in their faces and so “funny-looking” to Jamsie’s eyes that some of his old fears returned momentarily.

  Ara had begun to build up a clientele and make some money in the traffic of narcotics when he seemed suddenly to go to pieces. He became gaunt and thin. His moods were unbearable in their rages and black depressions.

  One evening, a rainy Friday late in December 1939, Ara arrived home drenched to the skin. He had been up for three days and three nights. His teeth were chattering. He drank more than usual. He coughed up blood during the night. The next morning, Lydia had not come home, and Ara was in a high fever. All the strain of seven years suddenly broke him.

  Jamsie called old Dr. Schumbard finally. He said Ara was dying of tuberculosis. Ara refused to go into the hospital. There was nothing Jamsie could do.

  The next few days were a nightmare. Lydia did not come for the entire weekend. Ara’s fever could not be reduced. He was frequently delirious and drank when he was not. Jamsie finally went out and scoured all his mother’s haunts until he found her. Together, they watched over Ara, waiting for the end.

  While he was sitting one evening by himself at Ara’s bedside after Lydia had gone out for a while, Jamsie had the feeling again of someone being near him. It was not unpleasant and not at all frightening. He recalls that his feeling was more or less pleasurable, as if a friend or confidant had come to be with him when he had no one else. The sensation did not last all the time, and it varied in intensity.

  About eight days after he had collapsed, Ara suddenly sat up in bed one morning and started to scream at the top of his voice: “I want my old stick! You hear! All of you! My old stick. Just a few more hot licks! I want my old stick!” His face was bathed in that “look.”

  Jamsie and Lydia tried to hold him down, but Ara fought them off. He scrambled out of bed in his bloodstained nightshirt, hobbled into the living room, unlocked the drawer where he had hidden his clarinet. He took it out of its case and screwed on the mouthpiece.

  “J
ust a few more hot licks before we kick the bucket, heh!” gibbered Ara, spittle drooling from the corners of his mouth. The silver stops of the clarinet twinkled in the sunlight.

  “Me old stick!” Jamsie heard him mumble.

  Ara blew a few uncertain notes, tried some scales, went into a few bars of the upper register, then low down, all the time gaining fullness of tone and sureness.

  As Jamsie and his mother watched, Ara began to adlib some blues. He tottered and stumbled unsteadily around the room, scraping over the worn carpet, bumping into furniture. He paused for a moment in front of Lydia’s handwritten memento and cackled at it derisively. Then, playing again, he stumbled away and then back, until he stood looking at the old icon still covered with the black cloth. His face got serious. There was silence for a second. Jamsie remembers holding his mother’s hand in anguish as they both watched Ara.

  Then Ara played the first bars of an old Armenian hymn to the Virgin. He started to sway back and forth. Lydia and Jamsie both moved quickly to help him, but they were too late. Trailing off in the middle of his song, he doubled over, coughed violently, and fell forward, clawing the air for support. His hand caught the black drape over the icon, and it came away as he fell.

  When they reached him, he was on his back, the black drape clutched in one hand, the clarinet in the other. Above him, the icon glimmered in the morning light with its old gold, blue, and brown colors. For the first time in many years, Jamsie looked at the tranquil eyes of the Virgin.

  Then he looked at his father’s face, and a weight was lifted off him. In death the “look” had gone. Ara’s features had returned to something resembling what they had been ten years before. Jamsie never forgot that change at his father’s death. He still could not understand the “look,” but he was glad for Ara that it had gone. Ara was buried in Brooklyn’s Greenwood to sleep with the other 400,000 people already there.

  The following week Lydia told her son he was on his own. Except for two visits, Jamsie was not to be with her again until her death in 1959. As he walked up Broadway that day of parting with his mother, all he heard were Lydia’s words: “You’re on your own now.”

  The old el had been torn down; and they were starting the 6th Avenue subway. Jamsie stood for a long time watching the workmen. A flood of resentment took hold of him. They were spending $65 million on that subway, he had read in the newspaper. But his own father was dead, his mother was an aging prostitute, and he had been helpless to change any of that. It all made no sense.

  A curious new feeling was building up in him. Without moving, without seeing anything different or hearing an ethereal voice, he felt as if an alternative to his misery of loneliness was being offered him. It was accompanied by fear. But he experienced also the same strange sense of companionship as on the night he first knew his mother would be a prostitute. He was alone, but he was not really alone. He felt the loss of his father very deeply. He had deep misgivings for his mother’s well-being. Yet both of them slipped into the background of his mind. In the forefront was this new, unsettling, but rather welcome feeling of being wanted, of not being really alone.

  In that moment, for the first time, he was certain that there was, indeed, some presence, someone or something present to him, and that to accept it meant renouncing any genuine love for his father and mother as he had known them in childhood and early youth.

  In 1940 Jamsie was promoted to guide at NBC. Then, on the invitation of a very close friend of his father, he went to live and study in Oklahoma City. The friend provided him with enough money to follow courses in journalism and broadcasting; he did part-time work to supplement his income.

  The years in Oklahoma City were tranquil ones for Jamsie. There was no recurrence of the “funny look.” He rarely had a sense of the strange presence, and he formed some solid friendships.

  He moved back to New York in 1946, at the age of twenty-three, and started to build a career in radio. Outside work, he lived a quiet life. He spent most of his time either at home listening to records and reading, or wandering the streets of midtown and lower Manhattan.

  He always hoped he would find his mother. Nobody in her old haunts seemed to know where she was or what had happened to her. Eventually word reached him from an old family friend that she was living in Flushing. He had one long visit with her there.

  Lydia was much deteriorated. There was still a deep feeling between them; but both felt and tacitly decided that, except for some serious personal crisis, they should see each other rarely. Meeting was too painful.

  At the same time, Jamsie was also engaged in a search of a very different kind. Once he set foot in New York again, he caught glimpses of that “look”—in the subway, from the middle of crowds, aloft among the neon signs, in movie houses, and sometimes late at night, before he went to bed and when he stood looking out the window at the lights of Manhattan.

  And he now felt something else that was new and, in its own way, reassuring: a violent and unconquerable persuasion that he had always known what “it” was, who “it” was. His old fright was transformed into an insatiable urge to remember. If he could only remember what “it” was.

  Sometimes, in off-moments, he seemed to be on the verge of realizing what or who “it” was, of recalling the place and the time when he had been told about it. He could not shake the idea that he had been told about it.

  But his efforts always ended in frustration. Just as names and places were about to rush into his mind and to his lips, something would happen inside him, and he would lose his grip on them. His frustration at this continual defeat began to produce a rage in him.

  Jamsie had one last meeting with Lydia. She had moved from Flushing to lower Broadway. During those few hours he spent with her, all his rage and frustration was dissipated. Lydia, by now living on church welfare, spoke to him slowly and quietly about his father and about his own future. This was the last experience of human tenderness Jamsie was to have for many years. Later he left word of his whereabouts with the local precinct and the church authorities who helped Lydia, promising to keep them posted of any change in his address. He kept that promise.

  It was during this period of Jamsie’s life that his colleagues at the radio station began to notice that he talked to himself; even more oddly, he occasionally flew into solitary rages. Of course, the moment Jamsie realized other people were watching, he became a very amiable and smiling man, to compensate for any unpleasant impression he might have given. Yet, time and time again, he could be seen walking alone on the streets or in the corridors of the radio station, or standing in the washroom, his eyes wide and staring, his nostrils flaring, and his lips drawn back over his teeth as if in some deep, internal, all-absorbing effort.

  After two years in New York, Jamsie was transferred to Cleveland. Here he had his first paralyzing dose of what became commonplace in his life a few years later.

  One evening he was walking down Euclid Avenue on his way home. All day his mind had been opening and closing on the endless puzzle: when and where had he been told about “it,” about that “look”? Since his arrival in Cleveland, all appearances of the “look” had ceased. But this only seemed to increase his curiosity and his need to know the answer. Tonight, it seemed to him, he was very near to recalling exactly.

  As he walked on, memories and words began to gather up out of a deep darkness of recollection and slowly to take shape. He was almost craning forward as he peered within himself with profound intensity to catch them. He began to feel excited, as he felt a growing realization that this was the moment.

  Suddenly, just as he was about to see those images and say those words, the words and pictures—as he describes it—seemed to form themselves into a long, quickly moving stream and “floated like lightning” out of the top of his head and up into the sky. It had all escaped him!

  He jumped up and down on the pavement in frustration, looking up at the night sky with tears in his eyes. Then, when he saw nothing up there but clouds, he tur
ned away and went dejectedly toward the small restaurant where he normally took his supper.

  At the door of the restaurant he stopped in astonishment. It was too much! There, at the back of the dining room, among the crowded tables and chatting people, he saw a face with that “look.” He pushed his way past waiters and packed tables. But when he reached the place where the “face” had been, he found two staid people, an aging man and woman, eating their dinner in stony silence. They looked at him briefly and disinterestedly, then went on eating.

  From that moment, Jamsie was convinced that somebody or something was playing hide-and-seek with him. But he could not figure out how it was all done or why. It became frequent in his daily life for words and memories to behave like the floating lightning and to “dive” out of his skull. Sometimes he saw them silhouetted against the sky before they disappeared far, far up into the clouds; sometimes they went so fast he could not catch sight of them at all.

  In successive years and at various stations where he worked (Detroit, 1951; New Orleans, 1953; Kansas City, 1955; Los Angeles, 1956), the story was always the same. He tried once to explain it all to a psychiatrist in Los Angeles, but he found the sessions with him unproductive and infuriating.

  He had one friendship with a woman in Kansas City that might have become serious. But one evening, only a few weeks after they had begun dating, Jamsie treated her to such an uncontrolled exhibition of rage, frustration, and jealousy that she broke up with him then and there.

  Just about a year after his transfer to Los Angeles, he had his first face-to-face meeting with the source of his trouble. He lived in Alhambra at the time, and drove each day to the radio station.