The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  At the Knitting Factory, the tenorman had ceased and desisted. A stray pianist wandered up onto the stage, began to frame soft chords.

  Sasha sat in.

  The drum kit, in keeping with current fashion, was a leviathan. ‘Why I’m not playing tenor sax, drums are better swimmers,’ Sasha had said, recalling the drowned Selmer. So now he set sail on the back of a monstrous octopoid, all cymbals and gongs and cowbells, vibraphonic tubes, Tibetan chimes. And he played the twelve-bar blues.

  The music was not much. But the stance – eyes rolled back and sightless, head tossing in quasi-narcotic trance, cigarette at droop on slack lower lip – was a dead ringer for the young Sal Mineo, vintage The Gene Krupa Story.

  Catching sight of his crazed reflection, distorted in a cymbal, Sasha laughed just like a boy. And when the number ended, and he was back safe in the dark, he went on laughing still. ‘Crease you could be stropping razor. Was perfect perfection,’ he said. The tenorman started bleating again, and Sasha called for 7UP. ‘Vsegda gotovy,’ he said. ‘Always ready.’

  14

  The story in Street News was called ‘How to Make Pigeon Stew,’ by Cleveland Blakemore. It read: ‘It was too late to go to the soup kitchen on 80th Street. The evening meal was shut out by 4:30 and it was 5:00 now. If you didn’t get a food ticket you were beat when they started handing out the chow. I was starving to death. My stomach felt dull and lumpy, and my head was light from low blood sugar.

  ‘It had been raining all week long, and it was wiping out my small supply of cash. I liked to tell people that I was “the only homeless man in New York who was never broke” – but now I was. I had sold all the umbrellas I kept for my rainy day back-up, and I wasn’t collecting aluminum cans while it was pouring.

  ‘I tried to sell paperbacks in front of Tower Records earlier that morning, but a flash flood had ruined all the books before I could even throw a sheet of plastic over them. I lost about three hundred like-new books I found in a dumpster near Central Park. I tried to lay out a couple of copies of Architectural Digest, but they got ruined by more surprise precipitation and I got really depressed. I never cry, but I felt like I could when I pushed my cart back under the bridge on 59th Street and collapsed on my foldaway bed.

  ‘I tried to turn on the TV, but something was wrong with our makeshift electricity again. It looked like the rain had seeped onto the cables overhead and shorted out my juice. I read for a while and felt bad. I couldn’t seem to make myself get up and do anything.

  ‘Then all of a sudden I was awake and rested and hungry as hell – and it was starting to get dark outside.

  ‘A few minutes later my roommate Steve straggled into the makeshift hut I had built. I knew he had a drug problem, and we weren’t talking much anymore; just a hello whenever we happened to pass. I knew he never stole from me, so I liked having him in the hut whenever I was gone, to keep an eye on the books and stuff. He was a good guy deep down, but he was screwed up on drugs.

  ‘The thrum of the cars overhead as they sped across the bridge was like weird occult music. It lulled me to sleep at night, like hearing the roar of your mother’s blood around you in the womb. And through the rumbling, I could hear the soft cooing of the pigeons roosting in the dark girders trying to stay out of the rain.

  ‘Steve brought everything that we had left in the way of groceries and set them down on our “dining table.” A pack of 50-cent chocolate chip cookies. Four-for-a-dollar Ramen Instant Noodles. A can of sweet corn. A bag of day-old bagels from the Bagel Factory on 79th Street. A half bottle of Wesson cooking oil and a box of Corn Flakes.

  ‘He lit a fire in our oil-barrel stove, put our “wok” on top of it, and went to get some water from the open fire hydrant across the street to boil up the noodles with.

  ‘I sat down on a cinderblock and watched as he tried to put together an Instant Noodle Corn Soup.

  ‘I knew what my father would say if he were here.

  ‘“Ordinary men are weak. Don’t be weak. Do whatever proves necessary. Be strong. Don’t be wretched or overcivilized. Harden yourself inside and just do it. At one time, it was the stoic who survived over all others.’

  ‘“How about a little bird meat in that?” I said as I rose to my feet and strolled over to a pile of rubbish and bricks.

  ‘Steve watched me as I selected a dirty orange chip from a brick and hefted it in my hand. He grinned. “You’re bullshitting me,” he said, continuing to stir the noodles.

  ‘The sun was almost gone. I could still hear the soft coos overhead. They seemed to be coming from one particularly dark corner of the bridge in a complex intersection of girders.

  ‘I drew back and winged the chip as hard as I could. It sailed into the darkness, vanished, then clattered to the ground seconds later. “You don’t want to do that,” Steve said, sounding uneasy.

  ‘I pretended I didn’t hear him. My second throw stirred the birds up overhead. Several of them fluttered off in fright, like gray spirits in the fading light. My third throw was wild, and I never heard it come down.

  ‘The fourth rock was a disc which had been honed to a jagged edge on all four corners. I found it under an old sweater. It felt heavy and lethal.

  ‘It was closer to a handaxe, probably looking a lot like the ones they found in Olduvai Gorge in Africa, where chipped flint weapons bear testament to the favorite tools of our ancestry.

  ‘I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a hominid on the African savanna, after a day of hunting with no food and desperate for even one kill. What kind of stone would that carnivorous, primitive mind select from the rubbish pile? Probably a stone just like the one I had in my hand.

  ‘I knew even before it hit, it was a perfect throw.

  ‘The pigeon was still alive, shaking and twitching its broken wing when it hit the ground. I used to hunt doves with my father when I was eight, so I knew exactly how this worked. I gave the head a quick twist. The neck cracked, and the head came off like a cork out of a bottle. The wings still moved in a reflex action. My hands felt warm and wet.

  ‘I squeezed the lower parts of the bird, and the entire body slipped out from beneath the feathers like a silk purse. A small lump of meat the size of a large apple. I opened the breast with my thumbs and cleaned out the entrails.

  ‘“Boil it good,” I said to Steve as I dropped it into the hot pan and poured in the rest of the contents of the Wesson bottle. “No telling what sort of disease these birds might have. Leave it in there at least an hour.”

  ‘I walked away and washed my hands under the open hydrant. Steve was still gaping when I got back. I sat down beside him and watched the fire. “Get over it, homeboy. Everything on earth lives by consuming something else. It’s no big deal.” Steve didn’t say anything.

  ‘And then we ate the pigeon, the noodles, the corn. And finally the cookies.

  ‘I went to bed on a full stomach.’

  Cleveland Blakemore in person was a golden boy. He came from Richmond, Virginia; was full of Confederate dash. Standing outside Tower Records in NoHo, unmarked and gleaming, he looked the perfection of the doomed Southern hero, a reborn Jeb Stuart or John Pelham. But he was not homeless now, he was well rested and plump. Cookbooks and shiny picturebooks were flying off his cart at a rate of two hundred, three hundred dollars a day. Still he wanted more. ‘It’s the time we live in,’ he said. ‘If you don’t get more, you don’t get any.’

  He had lived in the shantytown beneath the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge for a full year. In that time, he had steeped himself in Nietzsche, Darwin, and Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative, and they had left him with a theory. ‘The lion roars. In any jungle he is king,’ Cleveland Blakemore said. His voice was brisk and dismissive, a bark. ‘The lion rules,’ he said.

  The homeless could not accept this; that was why they were homeless. They watched TV and saw consumer heaven, The Wonderworld of Plutography, and knew they couldn’t measure up. So they fell by the wayside. They took refuge in booze
or dope, and they ended up underneath the bridge. ‘Not because there isn’t enough to eat,’ he said. ‘Because they’re not equipped to grab their share. They’re not fitted.’

  When first he landed in New York, he’d not been fitted himself. Promises were made to him and broken, golden lures extended, then snatched away. For a time, he had lost hope. ‘Just gave up,’ he said. ‘I was sickened. It was like, if I couldn’t play on Dynasty or Falcon Crest, I would not play at all.’ But the night of the pigeon had saved him. In the whirl of the sharpened stone, the fall of the broken bird, he had discovered his proper self, the true order of Man: ‘Everything on earth lives by consuming something else. Get over it, homeboy.’

  It was that simple. ‘Ordinary men are weak,’ his father had said. But he, Cleveland Blakemore, was not an ordinary man. Selling books off a handcart was only a beginning. When he had built up a stake, he would move on, escalate. Where to, he did not yet know. Or maybe he did, but was not saying. Either way, his homeless days were done.

  He spoke with self-pride but no malice. Caught by the morning sunlight, he glowed with recklessness and ardor, the image of Aryan glamour. He cast a disowning hand at Broadway, not at the shoppers who thronged the sidewalks but at the loafers, the lost, the whole doomed city beyond. ‘These people,’ he said, smiling with white teeth. ‘They don’t think that they can make it.’ His eyes glittered but did not connect. ‘And you know what?’ he said. ‘They can’t make it.’

  Stranded midstream across the boulevard, as if waiting his cue, a man in a dirty pink blanket stood teetering on one leg and feebly flapping his arms, like an oil-slicked flamingo. ‘Fuck that shit. Fuck that shit,’ he kept saying. Then he lay down flat, face down, defying the traffic to run him over. ‘You can’t do that,’ a lawman said.

  ‘I’m doing it,’ said the man.

  ‘Well, you can’t,’ said the cop.

  ‘Fuck that shit,’ said the man.

  On either bank, the shoppers passed by with locked eyes, staring straight ahead. Tower Records on a Saturday was the hottest spot on all Broadway, a daylong cabaret. These people were not invited.

  Still they came. A short stretch upstream, more men in blankets sat hunkered against the brick walls of Hebrew Union College. Cleveland Blakemore called them Banquo’s Ghosts.

  The district had traveled full circle. In 1800, Astor Place was Manhattan’s last outpost, a narrow country lane, north of which lay farmland. Then Broadway arrived, and it became the Bohemian Woods, lined with dance halls and bordellos, the last word in gambling hells: ‘The sole purpose of the area is riot,’ the New York Herald wrote.

  The Astor Place Riot of 1849 was definitive. It was whipped up by the Know Nothings, a political party/secret society sworn to purge America of immigrants, especially the English and the Irish. The announcement that William Macready, the British tragedian, was going to play Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House signaled war, and fifteen thousand assorted hooligans came swarming up out of the Five Points and the Bowery. ‘So fair and foul a day I have not seen,’ Macready began, and then the mob stormed the building. Rocks were hurled, pavements ripped up. The police fought back with clubs. Ned Buntline, one of the Know Nothings’ leaders, brandished a sword and yelled, ‘Shall the sons whose fathers drove the baseborn miscreants from these shores give up Liberty?’ At this, the militiamen raised their muskets and volleyed into the air. A rioter ripped open his shirt, exposing red flannel underwear, and dared them to take aim. ‘Fire into this! Take the life of a freeborn American for a bloody British actor! Do it!’ he cried, and the militiamen did. They fired point-blank into the crush, New Yorkers gunning down New Yorkers.

  Twenty-two were killed, 150 wounded. Inside the theater, meanwhile, Macready ploughed on undeterred. ‘The cry is still They come,’ he declaimed. ‘Our castle’s strength will laugh a siege to scorn.’ A chandelier came crashing down into the center aisle, and the Opera House went dark. Outside, the street was wedged solid with the fallen. ‘Here let them lie,’ said Macbeth, ‘till famine and the ague eat them up.’

  Afterwards, the neighborhood hushed. Broadway moved on uptown, the brothels and blind tigers went with it, and what remained was a backwater, a fringe of Greenwich Village. Walt Whitman and Fitz-James O’Brien frequented Pfaff’s, a rathskeller at Bleecker Street, where the beer was watery, the conversation windy, but they played a mean game of skittles. Then that too was gone.

  For a hundred years nothing stirred. It was a place of wholesale dry goods, of millinery, ready-made suits and button factories, always more button factories. New York University abutted it, and a couple of student bars clung on. Otherwise, it was Broadway’s dourest stretch, a sunless Death Valley between the West and East villages.

  Now it was a playground again; realtors had renamed it NoHo. Instead of Bohemian Woods, its theme was born-again Carnaby Street. Unique Clothing crowded haunch to paunch with the Dome Boutique, the Antique Boutique, and Pepito DeJoiz, the Home of the Chino Latino, and the sidewalks were lined with vendors, with jewelry stalls and used books, $5 wads of frankincense, Ghanaian necklaces of wood and bone, Islamic tracts, puff earrings shaped like giant shrimp.

  Hipshot from Tower Records there was a weekend flea market, a parking lot filled with Keith Haring T-shirts and turquoise love-pendants. On the redbrick wall out back, some hand unknown had scrawled the neighborhood’s new deal, POEMS AND CONDOMS FOR SALE, it read, ONE SIZE FITS ALL.

  It was a sign that Sasha would have enjoyed, but Sasha was not around. Three nights after the Knitting Factory, he had been mugged and left for demised.

  He had been sleeping in his cab, off Broadway on Lispenard. It was a practice that his dispatchers had warned him against many times but, for Sasha, all warnings were incitements. ‘So on I sleep. And how I am dispatched,’ he said.

  The details were fuzzy. All he could remember was a noise of shattering glass, a blast of freezing night air. Then some hand unseen had knocked him sprawling. His wallet and all of his treasures – the Christmas decorations, the stuffed dragon with the footlong tongue, even the girl with the melting kimono – were removed. Footsteps moved off down the sidewalk. Two sets, he thought. Then one set had returned, nice and slow.

  ‘Not to ask,’ he said. Propped up in his hospital bed, his skull festooned in white tape, he looked less like a victim than a snow-decked Christmas tree. Total strangers burst out laughing when they passed. This did not improve his mood. ‘Is not to whistle Dixie,’ he said. But he himself could not forget. He had taken sixty stitches; his skull screamed every time he moved it. Worse, his belief had been betrayed. ‘Right off Broadway. Twenty yards, maybe less,’ he said. His red mouth, framed by white, turned down like Al Jolson filmed in negative. ‘How could she?’ he said.

  With NoHo coming up next, what was more. ‘My best bit. My own village,’ he said. Shutting his eyes, he strained to float back down to the street, cruise its sidewalks this bright Saturday. ‘All world is stirring there,’ he said. ‘Is total pot of melt.’

  The mix was dizzying: homeboys from Bed-Stuy and Fordham Road, ACT-UPs from Christopher Street, NYC activists and upstate preppies, street artists from Alphabet City and con artists from Jersey City, Bush Leaguers from the Upper East Side and sons of STABs from the Upper West, Psychedelia Nows in acid-dyed culottes, radical lesbians in combat boots, disco divas and postpunk transsexuals, undercover cops done up as Rastas, bikers done up as Pentecostal priests, Pakistani B-Boys with shaven skulls and Cambodians with rat-tails, Albanians all in matching denim, white-robed Muslims, and one lone Zoroastrian, name of Myron, pushing pamphlets outside Top Tomato.

  There were civilians, too; Shopper Joes, bastions of the new bourgeoisie, flashing Billy Joel CDs and Nelson Mandela T-shirts. But they were merely background, a blur. What registered, vivid as a schoolyard mural, was the cavalcade: Big Youth.

  Its clubhouse was the sidewalk outside McDonald’s. For generations, kids on the loose had idled in Washington Square Park, three blocks to the west.
But the coming of crack had put that off-limits: ‘Too many dealers, too many cops,’ said Rashan Ray Perry. ‘Too hard to tell the difference.’ So they’d shifted their gift to Big Mac’s.

  Rashan Ray Perry himself was nineteen years old. At six feet three and 143 pounds, he looked like a Soul Train scarecrow, the advance man for a famine. On the street, his name was Stretch.

  Days he worked at a TriBeCa loading bay, hefting sacks of dog food and artificial fertilizer. That made him an exception, for most of the McDonald’s Jacks were either in college or school. A few were Korean, the rest Hispanic and black, and they hung here each weekday afternoon, all day Saturdays.

  Fashion plates, this month they favored elephant-baggy pants and Brooklyn Dodger baseball shirts, newsboy leather caps, subway-token earrings. Gold chains – cables – were Out; gold toothcaps – fronts – were In. So were glass-bead bracelets, shark’s teeth necklaces. But the greatest glory was their coiffures: ‘This is,’ said Rashan, ‘the year of serious hair.’

  Fades, braids, and designer dreads: Rearing up above the traffic, like trophies stuck on a battlement, were thirty-seven heads, each carved in a different shape. There were Mohawks and Checkerboards and classical Shags. There was Warlord hair, brush-cut like a privet hedge in front, a Chinese pigtail in back; and Samson hair, a footlong waterfall on the right side, shaved bald on the left; and Trenchtown Dreads and Uptown Dreads; and Plague Dreads, a field of blighted cornrows dyed yellowdog and ocher; and Tremont Fades, Brownsville Fades, and Koran Fades inscribed with Islamic characters. Baddest of all, there were Messageheads, cranial billboards blazoned with the owners’ names and/or beliefs, I AM THE JAM, said Rashan Ray Perry’s.

  He also wore sky-blue bib coveralls, a spotted green ascot, a whitebone skull earring. But his speech was muted, his manner discreet. ‘Conservative style,’ he said. ‘Don’t play me no slamming doors.’