The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  With his missing front teeth and tiny stick body, his head cocked in permanent query, he looked a pensionable child. But his age was sixty-seven, and his joints hurt. Above the massage table, next to JOY, LUCK, LONGEVITY, was a Chinese calendar scrawled with handwritten figures. They kept track of Robert’s age, day by day, had he lived.

  Side by side, we sat on the rubbing board, feet dangling like urchins. ‘I issue no complaints,’ said Wing.

  A few months after the shooting, he had received a last vision. In a whirlwind of the number six, he saw a shrine. At its altar sat a dragon with blood-slavered jaws. Then a purple cloud passed overhead, the shrine turned black, and the dragon burst into flames, was consumed.

  ‘We are surrounded by signs and omens,’ Wing had said. ‘Ignore them all.’ Just this once, however, he had vetoed his own commandment. Rising up in the night, he threw on his clothes, went running through the streets to the United Orient Bank, to watch it burn, watch the Sixth Dragon burn up with it.

  As always, he had misread the signals. By the time Wing arrived, the bank was already blocked off by FBI men, its directors under arrest. But there were no flames, and Eddie Chan himself was long gone. Prewarned, he had escaped to Singapore.

  The raging bonfire of Sam Wing’s dream proved to be only lanterns and flambeaux to honor Benny Ong. In the Sixth Dragon’s absence, Uncle Seven resumed his lost kingship. Eighty years old now, slow but stately, he could be seen every noon, crossing Pell Street to the Hip Sing Credit Union, to consult with tong officials. In a pinstriped business suit, complete with carnation and diamond stickpin, he then strolled the few yards to Sun Tong Gung, where he took Dim Sum with his wife and counsellors. Afterwards, he napped, he played cards.

  And Eddie Chan? He ran from Singapore to Taiwan, then on to Manila, to Paris, to the Dominican Republic. It was rumored that he was plotting his return. Meanwhile, the United Orient survived, a four-floor pagoda on Mott at Canal. So did the On Leong, the Ghost Shadows, and the Flying Dragons, the Tung On, the Fu Ching, the Triads. So did the BTKs.

  Inside his cubicle, Wing rubbed his clawed hands with Ben-Gay. ‘This does no good. Nothing does,’ he said. ‘It merely offers diversion, the soup of idle souls.’

  He did not cease to gamble. He never had. With the three thousand dollars left by the Ghost Shadows, he had carried himself through Aqueduct, Belmont, and most of Saratoga. After that, he’d gone back to nickel and diming. In flush seasons, he hit Atlantic City; in thin, he played skat. When he lost too much, there was trouble. ‘My family do not honor their progenitor,’ he said, without rancor. Truth was, they could not afford to. In direst extremity, Jenny might sometimes cough up a dollar or two. Otherwise, Wing’s debts were paid the old-fashioned way, in fists and head-butts and steel-capped boots. ‘It is quickest,’ he said.

  As for visions, he had none. ‘That is a young man’s game. I am old,’ he said. ‘My wind is shot.’ The quest was done. ‘It is better so,’ said Wing.

  It was 3:20. In the room through the curtain, Raidas had fallen silent and even Jenny slept. Sasha sat slumped on the clear-plastic sofa, reading Only a Gilded Cage: The Lives and Loves of the Soap Stars. The twin TVs blinked on.

  Outside on the dark stairs, I fumbled for Wing’s hand, got his sleeve instead. ‘You have the name correctly spelled? Robert Eamonn,’ he said. ‘Called himself Bobby 2 Bad.’

  In the streets below, the fog seemed colder, more impenetrable than ever. Groping by curbstones and blank walls, we edged our way back to Broadway and set our faces uptown, towards EmCee Marie and sleep.

  Somewhere in the second block, a large body occurred. It was moving upstream in heavy hiker’s boots, an overcoat like a tent. As it came abreast of us, the body seemed to waver, then it plunged on again and was swallowed up in gloom. But it did not go far. A few steps on, the sound of its footsteps faltered, then ceased.

  When I retraced my steps, I found a face like a Halloween mask carved out of an oversized pumpkin. Its owner smiled fearfully. ‘Good sir,’ he said. ‘I search.’

  German? Silesian? Slovene? The accent escaped me. So did the words that followed, spilled out in a job-lot tumble. ‘What for looking? Searching what?’ I asked, inane. The man raised his heavy shoulders in a shrug, then let them slump again. ‘I search I whatnot know,’ he said.

  Interval

  Really, it was Barnum’s fault. Before him, Broadway had been just a Main Street, the city’s heart of business and affairs. Its history did not stem from any mystic quality of place, but simply from its centrality. Der Hagh Wagh Way, the High Wagon Way, it bound Manhattan together, a thick, strong spine. So great men gathered, great things happened there. But there was no abstract involved. Nobody came to Broadway on a dream.

  Then Phineas T. Barnum appeared. Born in 1810, he was a country boy from Bethel, Connecticut, where his father was in turn a farmer, a grocer, a tailor, and a tavernkeeper. Phineas was an Old Testament name meaning ‘brazen mouth,’ but his childhood was placid, unstrained. Only Ivy Island enlivened it.

  It was a practical joke. All through Barnum’s infancy, his family kept telling him of this wondrous island that he owned, deeded to him by his grandfather. According to Struggles and Triumphs, it was painted as ‘the promised land … a land flowing with milk and honey … caverns of emeralds, diamonds and other precious stones, as well as mines of silver and gold.’

  When he was ten, his father took him to take possession of this Shangri-la. After a long trudge through muddy swamps and brambles, plagued by hornets’ nests, he stood at last in his domain. And it turned out a mirage: ‘I saw nothing but a few stunted ivies and straggling trees. The truth flashed upon me. My valuable “Ivy Island” was an almost inaccessible, worthless bit of barren land… .’

  The incident colored everything that followed. For the rest of his life, he would invent his own Ivy Islands. That way they might fool others, but never again could they cheat him.

  At sixteen, he moved to Brooklyn, became a clerk. He was quick, ambitious, big with energy and self-belief. On Sunday afternoons, he strolled on Broadway. It was an elegant promenade lined with poplar trees. But there was nothing much to do. There were a couple of theaters, a few grand hotels and restaurants. Above Canal, in the city’s outskirts, there was also Vauxhall Gardens and Niblo’s Garden, an open-air saloon and music hall. For the rest, pleasure got short shrift.

  This was no accident. Among New York’s arbiters, the prevailing belief was mass entertainment was dangerous, ungodly. ‘Laws were blue, and life was gray,’ wrote Irving Wallace in The Fabulous Showman. ‘Theaters and exhibitions were regarded by most as outposts of the devil. Sport was confined to intoxication, assault and battery, and discreet fornication.’

  Even these rough joys were denied to Broadway man. If he wished to roister, he must go wallow in the pig troughs of the Bowery, the grogshops of the Five Points. On the boulevard, he must be sober, heavy with gloom.

  ‘Of curiosity and wonder and sensation there was little.’ To Barnum, even in embryo, this couldn’t be right. ‘This is a trading world and men, women and children, who cannot live on gravity alone, need something to satisfy their gayer, lighter moods,’ he believed, ‘and he who ministers to this want is in a business established by the Author of our nature.’

  Almost ten years went by before he could start ministering in earnest. He ran a general store back in Bethel, he was a traveling showman, he dabbled in local politics. He edited a newspaper, the Herald of Freedom, and did sixty days in Danbury Jail for libel. He managed Signor Vivalla, who balanced bayoneted rifles on his nose. He was almost lynched by mistake, for the Reverend Avery, a Methodist minister and accused murderer. And then he found Joice Heth.

  It was his first great scam; humbug, the word was then. Joice Heth was introduced as George Washington’s nurse, now 161 years old but still full of running: ‘She weighs but Forty-Six Pounds, and yet is very cheerful and interesting. She retains her faculties in an unparalleled degree, converses freely, sings
numerous hymns, relates many interesting anecdotes of the boy Washington, and often laughs heartily at her own remarks, or those of the spectators.’

  Her impact was prodigious. New Yorkers of all classes, ‘lovers of the curious and the marvellous,’ thronged to see and question her. Then Barnum took her show on the road. For eight months she toured and then, exhausted, she died. Autopsy revealed her to be a well-preserved eighty. But the point had been made. In 1841, just turned thirty, Barnum opened his first American Museum.

  According to Irving Wallace, he was then ‘a Connecticut Yankee six foot two inches in height, a bundle of massive energy, with curly, receding hair about wide ingenuous blue eyes, a bulbous nose, a full, amused mouth, a cleft chin, and a high-pitched voice.’ Later on, his waistline would spread as his hairline ebbed, and his well-stuffed waistcoat, his beetling brows and knobby skull gave him more and more a Pickwickian look. But his energy level never dropped below volcanic. He was by no means a paragon. He could be money-grubbing and devious, exploitative, sanctimonious, cheap. Still sheer vitality, animal spirits, gusted all his sins before him, blown away by the gales of his own laughter. Self-styled the Prince of Humbugs, he was an overgrown child who recognized the child in all men, and it was this, more than anything, that made him Broadway’s true inventor.

  ‘His crusade,’ Wallace wrote, ‘was to make life a sinless carnival, to make mirth and play acceptable as a necessary portion of daily living.’

  Pleasure without guilt – it was no mean legacy. Before him, curiosity museums had been furtive, dust-ridden mausoleums. Usually they featured a few skeletons, a couple of death masks, perhaps a lecture with lantern slides. Barnum, by contrast, offered ‘educated dogs, industrious fleas, automatons, jugglers, ventriloquists, living statuary, tableaux, gypsies, albinos, fat boys, giants, dwarfs, rope dancers, live “Yankees,” pantomime, instrumental music, singing and dancing in great variety… .’

  It was only a preamble. From fleas and educated dogs, the showman moved on to General Tom Thumb, the attraction of the ages. Then there came the Mermaid from Feejee; Grizzly Adams; Jumbo the Elephant; the Great White Whale. Rival hucksters rose up in challenge, and Broadway filled with amazements. Not just museums and showplaces, but vaudevilles, concert saloons, and variety houses, giant department stores, theaters high and low. At every block, it seemed, there was the latest, the greatest. And somewhere along the line, the street became an idea.

  The idea boiled down to a single word, the most potent in the language. And that word, of course, was action.

  What Barnum had done was burst the dam; unpent all the energies, good and bad, that the blue laws and gray life had denied. The ultimate Ivy Island, Broadway became a synonym for release. You came to it on a risk. You packed up all your wit and nerve and endurance, your energy and your luck, and you brought them to the tables. Then you did not quit till you broke the bank or you were flat busted.

  The medium varied. It might be finance or politics, show business, law or crime, prizefighting, magic, art, or sex. But all the men and women who played Broadway were driven, at root, by the same motor: the love and lust of adventure.

  In another age or context, the same romance would have spawned explorers, mercenaries, gold rushers. But this was the time of the city; New York was the city and Broadway its apotheosis. By 1900, its action stretched clear from the Battery to Forty-second Street. Downtown, the major games were money and power; from Fourteenth Street upwards, money and sex. In both, the stakes were all or nothing.

  The turf had been staked out in roughly ten-block increments. As Broadway rode north, the smart money clung tight to its tail. At each successive crossroads – City Hall, Union, Madison, Herald, and, finally, Times squares – it would set up its lures, a fresh cavalcade of theaters and cafés, gambling dens, flash saloons, bordellos, then sit back, smug, and await the sound of those shuffling feet.

  Rialtos, columnists called them. By day, they were mere shopping spas: ‘Jewels, silks, satins, laces, ribbons, household goods, silverware, toys, paintings, in short rare, costly and beautiful objects of every description greet the gazer,’ wrote James McCabe. Then came darkness, and the night-lights, and all of this glitter was set to work. ‘The vehicles in the street consist almost entirely of carriages and omnibuses, each with its lamps of different colors. They go dancing down the long vista like so many fireflies. Here and there a brilliant reflector at the door of some theater sends its dazzling white rays streaming along the street for several blocks. Strains of music or bursts of applause float out on the night air from places of amusement, not all of which are reputable. Gaudily painted transparencies allure the unwary to the vile concert saloons in the cellars below the street. Here and there, sometimes alone and sometimes in couples, you see women, mainly young, and all flashily dressed, walking rapidly, with a peculiar gait, and glancing quickly but searchingly at every man they pass. Some of them are mere children.’

  The lights, of course, were cardinal. First there were gaslights, then the silver electricity for which Broadway was rechristened the Great White Way, and finally neon. Now it was the Glittering Gulch, the Fabulous Floodway, the Stem, the Heavenly Hell. ‘There’s a sucker born every minute,’ as Barnum may or may not have said, and they poured in from every lost corner of the planet. They were troupers; they were thrushes and hoofers, chorines, sugar daddies and stage-door Johnnies, gangsters and their molls, magicians, sword swallowers and flame throwers, bucket-shop floaters, speculators and prognosticators, touts, shysters and mouthpieces, honest rainmakers, faith healers, shamans, pols and fixers, lushes and hopheads, yeggs, dips, murderers and murderees, tune-smiths and rhyme-smiths, half-hand bigshots, scribes and sob sisters, champs and palookas, sirens, swells, boobs, hayseeds, torpedoes and tomatoes, dames, quails, moustaches, gigolos, just guys and dolls. A few of them made it and most of them didn’t and all of them wound up dead at the present time. It did not matter. They had had a piece of the action.

  Numberless were the hymns of praise. Give My Regards to Broadway and Lullaby of Broadway, Forty-five Minutes from Broadway, Broadway Baby, The Man Who Owns Broadway. One of the most forgettable was Broadway, the Heart of the World.

  Later generations would have their own theme songs, their own language and liturgy. But the basic nature of the adventure did not change. On Broadway you spun the wheel. At least you believed you did. In reality, of course, the wheel spun you.

  Two

  11

  ‘It might as well be spring,’ said Lush Life.

  All winter she’d lived in the dark. At the Hotel Moose, her window was kept blacked out, a shellacked drop-curtain nailed tight, so that no hint of daylight could sneak in. Inside, her room was lit by Japanese lanterns like glow-worms. Then came March. One morning the blind snapped, bright sunshine rushed in. It caught her naked.

  Lush Life’s room, a cell much like my own, was lined with clothes and old magazines. Somewhere in the middle, she’d made herself a pallet on the floor, a thing of coats and scarves and torn curtains, foam rubber and wadded sacking, wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. There she lunched by night-lights, slept by Night Train. In between, she lip-synched to Madame Butterfly.

  It was her season’s religion. A new production was in rehearsal; Lush Life had seen the costumes previewed in a Sunday supplement. Now her room was awash in thrift-store Japanesque and Maria Callas albums, through which she moved with tiny mincing steps, miming to her pet arias. When Cio-Cio-San expired, so did she. But she did not stay dead for long. ‘It doesn’t pay,’ she said.

  Not at the Hotel Moose, it didn’t. Here dying was service compris. A lean and languid Jamaican, name of Motion, had the job of sweeping up the corridors, checking the rooms. When he found a body that his broom could not rouse, he called the cops or the ambulance: ‘Depends on de cause of departure,’ he said. ‘Demise, or is it decease.’

  Demise meant natural causes, decease did not. In this bitter winter, the whole city had seemed a killing field racked by plag
ues. Shelters overflowed, welfare hotels were reduced to funded crackhouses. Even doorways were disputed: ‘You want freeze to death, somebody beat you to it,’ Motion said. ‘You want slit your own throat, some mother son stole the razor.’

  He was not a man who hastened. Hence his name. ‘Other men move, I just motion,’ he said. Eleven years back, he and his partner, Reds, had left their wives and families, traveled here from Negril: ‘One cardboard suitcase, two pair pants,’ Motion said. That had been another bitter winter. They had slept in paper bags, crawl spaces, elevator shafts. But they neither demised or deceased. Instead, they’d met a fellow countryman, Captain Deliver he was called, who fed them two laws to stay alive. Smile when you do, he’d said. Smile when you don’t.

  Over the years, the smiles had acquired a rictal fixity. Passing them on the stairs, with a bodybag toted between them, Lush Life would squeak, curl back against the walls. But they did not get paid to carry corpses. ‘Only dust,’ Motion said.

  A garden grew. It started down the hallway, in the wall by the fire escape. Nightly breakage of bottles and skulls had pitted the plaster like a firing range. All winter, pipes burst and were not fixed, water pipes and heating pipes, which caused the walls to weep. Crawling damp fed on the crevices, widened them into gullies. One day a patch of lichen appeared. Then suckers, then tendrils. Morning Glory swarmed the window-panes. Through the rotted linoleum, which had once been patterned with ducks, a neat crop of toadstools sprang up.