The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  The candle kept guttering. It was coated in some black filth that choked it and stank like a slaughterhouse. ‘Burning dead bodies in your room. It isn’t proper. Not camelfort,’ Lush Life said. ‘Not on your very first night.’

  For compromise, we sat in the dark with the door open. Out in the hallway, the bloods were smoking crack, mumbling. ‘Lush Life, Lush Life,’ somebody unknown kept keening, half-singing it.

  In the dimness, the highlights on her cheek and bare shoulder, the hollow of her throat, seemed filtered through stained glass: ‘Ladybeard, I am so sickly,’ she said. ‘Encore de Night Train, why not?’

  I bought it, she drank it; Denise Denise still did not come. The voice out in the hallway kept repeating Lush Life, Lush Life. ‘I won’t talk,’ she said, and she talked.

  Geraldo Cruz had come out of Bayonne, New Jersey, one mean town. His father had packaged dead chickens, and his mother sewed skirts in a sweatshop. Afternoons, after Geraldo got out of school, he used to care for his kid sister, Paloma. Together they’d play house and try on his mother’s clothes, even though they were kind of dowdy, no bright colors and the most dated styles, strictly from Rent-a-Frump.

  The shoes were worse. His mother had the saddest feet; she was a martyr to her bunions her whole life, so she could not tolerate pumps, only sandals and flats. Dresses looked silly that way, even nylons lost their flair. The best you could do was take a pair of Chinese-style satin slippers and restyle them, fake a heel with papier-mâché and bottlenecks. Which was exactly what Geraldo was doing the day his father got laid off work, came home early to get blind drunk, and found his son in a garter belt.

  This father was one tough Dominican. All the time, every day of his life, he’d be bragging and cursing, doing that macho strut. But now, face to face with Geraldo, he did not say a mumbling word, just crossed the room to the whiskey and climbed on board, slugging straight out of the bottle. Then he sat down bump on the floorboards, staring into the cracks. Still he didn’t start to yell; he spoke real soft. ‘You sick. You need help,’ he started out.

  ‘Fuck help,’ Geraldo told him. ‘I need heels.’ And he walked out of that house; he did not ever go back.

  He was fourteen going on fifteen. He had a dollar he’d taken out of his mother’s purse. It got him downtown and into the bus terminal, and there he’d met such a nice old man, and he told this man the saddest story, how he’d traveled out to Bayonne from New York to visit his best friend in the hospital, only somehow he’d lost all his money and now he was stranded, he couldn’t get home again. So you see. So the old man staked him to his fare and in return he asked for nothing, almost nothing, just to cop a feel. So Geraldo let him, what the hell? But afterwards he was crying; he was all upset. He started to make noise and the old man freaked, he was shaking and sweating blood, and he gave Geraldo fifty bucks, or it could have been a hundred, to keep his mouth shut. So he did. He rode the next bus into Manhattan, and when he climbed down on the New York sidewalks, the first thing he did, double-quick, he hauled ass to the nearest clothing store. At first the young lady serving looked at him kinda sideways, but then she saw he had a knife. So you see. So she smiled. His arms were piled up high with nylons and silk negligees, Maidenforms, satin panties, teddies, the works. He took them all in the changing room. Or part of him did. Geraldo Cruz went in, Lush Life came out. So you see.

  There the story left off. Whatever had happened since, she was not about to tell. Geraldo Cruz had been some other body, a person she had once known. So his story remained just that – history. Retelling it meant nothing more to her than telling a movie script or some story she’d read in the paper. But herself, Lush Life, that was something else again. She had her pride, her privacy. She might go fuck with a stranger. That didn’t mean she would tell him stuff.

  It was two o’clock. Out in the hallway, a subway rhythm, I could hear the slapping of heads and bodies against the walls. The Brothers Kassimatis were making their goodnight rounds, chasing demons. I closed the door, shut them out, shut us in. Somewhere close above me I could hear a slithering and hushing of silk, the kimono fluttering. Lush Life was shivering still. So we held hands in the dark.

  5

  There came a false spring, which lasted one day. For a full week it had been storming and sleeting nonstop, such blizzards that we’d scarcely ventured outside the Plum Blossom. Then one morning it was sixty degrees, and everything seemed made new.

  Lower Broadway was abandoned. At first light, the avenue looked like a film set, one of those Armageddon 2000, post-nuclear-holocaust jobs, when all humanity has been reduced to little brown puddles and only the garbage lives on.

  Walking uptown, we could track New York’s progress year by year, decade by decade. For as long as Manhattan had been settled, Broadway had been its hub, the main drag. It had been born as an Algonquin warpath; now it stretched far into the Bronx, twenty-one miles away. Story line of Broadway goes from rags to riches, Sasha quoted. Set on which it plays runs from harborside to hillside. Very name needs no elaboration. Is not called street, avenue, boulevard, parkway, alley, terrace, drive. Is Broadway and who would not know what that means? He sucked in sunlight through his nostrils, hollowed and deepened his voice for extra solemnity. Is spine of New York and each intersection with another avenue … sparks different interaction. Each of sparks generates own brilliance, which may flare briefly or lengthily, may fade or may burn once again. Broadway, in all euphoria, is Yellow Brick Road, one that seductively promises, but doesn’t guarantee, Emerald City at road’s end.

  He scratched his skull. Then he scratched it again. ‘What hell is meaning?’ he asked. The scuffing of his steel-capped heels on the sidewalk rang hollow, a dead canyon echo that made one look up for circling buzzards. ‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘Too quiet.’

  Not for long. As we passed the Wall Street subway, a single figure appeared in the mouth of the uptown stairwell. It belonged to a bookish little man in an army-surplus duffel coat and prehistoric sneakers, with his possessions in a Big Mac bag. Gray-faced and shrunken, he looked an ill man, climbed the steps with painful labor, holding on tight to the rail. When he hit the light, he ducked his head, as if the brightness hurt.

  At the top, poised between Broadway and the pit, he stopped to rest. Half a block away, a large swaddled woman was setting up a fruit stand. In the current fashion, it featured all manner of exotica. Not just apples and oranges, but man-goes and papayas, strawberries big as golfballs, California peaches, and many, many kiwis.

  The bookish man looked at them blankly, as though he’d never seen such stuff. ‘Well?’ said the woman, snappish, but he did not answer, just stood gawping and, as he gawped, he was hit.

  There was no warning. One moment he stood alone, the next he’d been ploughed under. As if at a secret signal, the morning’s first wave of workers was unleashed out of darkness, came pouring up the steps in a flood tide. The man in the duffel coat was sunk without trace. Then the wave had passed over, and he was left stranded. ‘Well?’ the fruit woman repeated.

  ‘I could tolerate a kumquat,’ the man replied.

  Between the first wave and the second, there was a brief gap, one minute, maybe two. After that the onslaught came nonstop. Swept away, we were flushed down Wall Street, plunged into regions of perpetual murk. The financial district was a maze of single-lane defiles. In New Amsterdam, they had been cowpaths. Now, oversoared by skyscrapers, they were abysms.

  Cliffs of fall frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed – when I looked up, the perpendiculars seemed pleated like an accordion, the lines converging as they fell, a dizzying plunge of stone and concrete and glass that dropped the entire gross tonnage upon the base of the skull, plumb on the pressure point. Perhaps that was why everyone seemed to walk tilted forward, necks bent and shoulders sagging, as if toting sacks of cement.

  Borne along by the crush, we swirled through the tube at random, washed up outside the New York Stock Exchange. It was a Roman Renaissance temple, its entrance fra
med by six massive Corinthian columns. On the pediment, in bas-relief, were allegorical figures of Agriculture, Mining, Motive Power, and Design. Their centerpiece, all powerful, was a goddess of infinite bounty.

  This goddess was named Integrity.

  The men in suits who entered her shrine passed us by with canceled faces. The elders favored neutrality, the impenetrable blandness of the poker player. The young preferred frozen rage.

  For both, the keynote was self-absorption, an unblinking android fixity. In money wars, this was called the Game Face, and it caught us unprepared. From recent TV and press coverage, we had been expecting a slaughterhouse, awash in human wreckage. ‘Bloody Monday. Death of Eighties. Good-bye good riddance to gold age of greed. Kinder, gentler greetings from recession,’ Sasha summarized. But no bodies flew out of windows; no gunshots echoed, off. On the contrary, the NYSE seemed exultant, en fête.

  From the visitors’ gallery, where we looked down from a great height, the trading floor was like a football field viewed from the bleachers. Recession or no, the arena teemed with straining bodies, scurrying back and forth in the choppy, speeded-up rhythms of Keystone Kops. We could see them flailing their arms, sense their bellowing. The pace never flagged. Still the point remained obscure. ‘Fun game, I think,’ Sasha said, ‘but how touchdowns are scoring?’

  Back on the streets, the hating faces rammed hard into our own, would not be denied. They carried energy but no vitality, hunger but no appetite. Overmatched, we backtracked.

  In Trinity Churchyard, where Wall Street returned to Broadway, we sat down among ancient graves. It was a seventeenth-century boneyard, the oldest in the city. Alexander Hamilton lay there, so did Robert Fulton and the Captain James Lawrence who died crying ‘Don’t Give Up the Ship.’ Now the walkways were littered with ticker tape and rolls of toilet paper, hangovers from some parade, and Barney, the Wicked Messenger, was sleeping it off beneath the west wall.

  It was the most consoling spot. When New York was in its infancy, Trinity had been in its anchor, the one stable point in its insatiable growth and shifting. Always it had hushed, had reassured. And its function was not changed. The church itself, rebuilt in the nineteenth century, might be a blackened urchin thing, all spire. But an organist was practicing Bach, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor; and in the graveyard the day oozed by, sweet-soft and sticky as saltwater taffy. ‘Tonight, tonight, I get my drums for sure,’ Sasha said, easing away, and soon I slept.

  When I reopened my eyes, I was being closely inspected by a man who looked like an antique black jockey. ‘You looking to get yourself robbed?’ he inquired.

  ‘Not right now.’

  ‘You could have fooled me.’

  His name was Lucius; he came from New Orleans. For forty-some years, he had shined the shoes of senior partners, CEOs, great tycoons: ‘And little bitty dirtbags, too.’

  Onyxing the Oxfords, he called it. In the days when fine work was still valued, it had been considered a craft. He’d even had his own business cards printed up. LUCIUS HAVENS, SHINIST, they read, CATERING TO THE CREAM OF MANLY FOOTWEAR. But of late he’d let them lapse. Wall Street man was too busy hustling to notice the niceties. His customers today, they didn’t know his name, didn’t look him in his face when they paid. What with all the French and Italian imports, the footwear itself was stylish enough but often neglected, ill used. ‘One true thing I have learned,’ said Lucius. ‘You can’t judge the mens by the shoes that’s wearing them.’

  He was a tubular piece of work, some five feet two of bumpy road, all angles and odd twists. He had arthritis, he said, and was cutting back on his work load. At seventy-four, all the stooping and the crouching that the shinist’s art required took its toll. But he still came in to Wall Street. It was the place he knew.

  There was a sandwich shop on Trinity Place that employed him part-time. ‘Sometimes I delivers, sometimes I just spreads,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I don’t feel right and I start in to miss my woman. My sweet wife Marie, I should say. She home in Brooklyn, Crown Heights, a long hour ride on the subway car, still I gotta go see her. I’m hard, y’understand. I’m so hard it hurts. Maybe it’s just morningtime, I still gotta take my easement. What else a man gonna do? When he so hard he hurts?’

  He pronounced it so hoard he hoyts; sucked on the phrase like a jujube, squeezing out the tang. When he laughed, which was often, he would wrap both arms tight about his skimpy child’s belly, as if to hold the entrails in. This laugh, a keening trainwhistle moan, made me shiver. But Lucius said it relieved him. ‘Hoyts so good,’ he said, ‘I could kindly enjoy to die.’

  On the stroke of 4:00, the market closed; at 4:01, the morning stampede reversed itself. Only this time the charge was in slow motion, an army in retreat, battered, not quite broken. Near the uptown subway entrance, the fruit stall was all out of black grapes and pomegranates. This was a sign, said Lucius, that the Dow Jones was up.

  He went east; I went west. On the far side of the churchyard, across a narrow wrought-iron bridge, was an upstairs pub called Michael’s I, a space as neutral as a doctor’s waiting room. ‘And how was your day?’ the barman inquired.

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Liquor Jack.

  His given name was Jack Young. In his pomp, he had been a financier, a home-run hitter, but now his role was reduced. ‘Short-term trading,’ he said. ‘I bunt.’

  At fifty-seven he was a man of flesh and many tangled tales. With wattles at droop and eyes like yesterday’s fried eggs, slimy side up, he looked like an elderly coonhound that had lost the scent. Still he had pedigree, panache.

  Thirty years back, there had been no sprightlier blade extant. The name alone, Liquor Jack, had been a code word for all things louche, unspeakable, irresistible. He had defined boulevardier, that magic word, and there were generations of debutantes, many now grandmothers, who still squeaked and colored at his mention.

  A battered grace survived. Sweat-stained armpits or no, he bore himself as a man apart, chosen. In these last years, Wall Street had been overrun by barbarians, a plague of swine. The old style and values were gone forever. Jack Young was left over.

  He had begun in Louisville. His mother’s family, the Seminons, were prime Kentucky bloodstock. They had been there as long as the state itself, and they had thrived. By the 1930s, they owned much of Mockingbird Valley and Indian Hills, and they lived in a prototype Tara, complete with crystal chandeliers, a sweeping stairway, and one cow. Then had come Thatcher Young, Jack’s father, to foul everything.

  A beautiful ne’er-do-well, his son called him. He had ranked ninety-eighth nationally at skeet and trap, worn his jodhpurs like one of God’s elect, but his notion of big fun was to sit alone at the center table of the Bachelor’s Cotillion in the Louisville Country Club with a dozen White Castle hamburgers and throw them, one by one, into the overhead fan. And when he went slumming in the bars downtown, picked up some girl from a meat-packing plant, and left her with child, that was bigger fun yet.

  Here was an awkwardness. The girl had to be pacified and sent away, the child brought up by Seminon grandparents, and Thatcher Young himself palmed off as the boy’s elder brother. Jack was schooled to ride a good seat, observe his knives and forks. He was a privileged person. When he was six years old, his grandparents were off on a trip somewhere, Thatcher was nowhere around, and Jack’s mother showed up, just appeared in the driveway and took him away in a pickup truck.

  She was a mountain woman, a classical Appalachian, gaunt and bloodless, emaciated to the point of being spavined. She lived in a fall-down, tin-roof shack somewhere way out in the backwoods, with a numberless tribe of relatives. Total strangers kept pawing Jack, hugging on him and kissing wet. It was the most peculiar sensation, not unsavory exactly but foreign, a thing that was not done. To escape, he spent his days throwing a hard rubber ball up onto the tin roof, then waiting till it rolled down again. His mother sat in the doorway; she watched but did not speak. When the dogs ran away with his ball, she brought him a replacement.
It was their one connection.

  On the fifth day, the Seminons came and took him back, and Jack did not see his mother again. Fifty years afterwards, he could not remember her face or the name of her home-place or any one detail about her. All that remained was the fat plock of the ball on the tin roof, like a stone dropped into deep waters, and the waiting till it reappeared, rolled back down to his hand.

  I submit to you, he said, I was not firmly rooted. He had grown up a gentleman, yes, but restless, volatile, always a tad unsteady. At sixteen, in lieu of just running away, he faked his age and enlisted in the navy. By the time he got out again, two years later, Thatcher had gobbled huge chunks from his inheritance. A mere $1.3 million survived.

  What to do? I submit to you, I was startled. But not for long. Turning the entire pot into cash, a spending wad, he took it to New York.

  What did all this have to do with Wall Street, with Broadway? In that era, quite a bit. Manhattan in the early fifties was full of such histories. It was the prime time of Cafe Society – Caff Sosh, in Liquor Jack’s shorthand; of the Stork Club, the Copa, El Morocco. People had names like Rollo and Beau and Slim, and their vocation was behaving badly with style, just wild enough to be amusing but not to be threatening. They had family and freedom, unlimited time, and they didn’t give a damn, not one.

  It was not easy now, slumped over his oars in Michael’s I, to conjure up just how it had felt. There had been such an ease, such utter certainty. In the whole of Western history, had any time and place been more confident? He thought not. America ruled the world, New York was the center of the universe, and thus it would always remain. And you, yourself, were immune. Impervious to age, damage, loss, all pain. Nothing bad could happen, not really bad. Nothing that could not be fixed.