The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  The year before, he had met Benny and MoRitz at the Paradise Garage, the Home of House. Up till then, dance clubs had repelled him. Growing up, he had seen Saturday Night Fever and thought it cretinous. All those Guineas drawn up in ranks, time-stepping, like androids on parade: ‘The sucker wrote that shit, we talking serious asshole,’ he said. And there was something else. ‘Tell the truth,’ he said, ‘I was scared. Like I didn’t trust my own body. Like maybe I thought, deep down, I was still the turkey buzzard, the no-dick ostrich with the runs. So if I start to dance, expose myself, I might be blowing my cover. Then everybody see through me, the thing I really am,’ Rashan said. ‘A fuckin’ freak.’

  Just one thing only could make him rethink. There was a young lady from Red Hook, her name was Paulette DePaul, the girl had a dancing Jones. If you did not take her clubbing, you did not take her at all. So Rashan went to the Garage. Under protest, but he went. And was swept away.

  ‘My pants were turned upside down,’ he said. In this place, freakishness was no deformity, no disgrace. On the contrary, it was the beau ideal: ‘Like you gotta be fucked up, I mean fucked up good, before you can get right.’

  Instead of dancing automatons, the floor was jammed with creatures that earth forgot. Some plunged and leaped like dolphins, some burrowed, some flew high, some seemed to swim underwater. Inside a chalked circle, Benny and MoRitz mirror-danced, bodies rigid and twitching. Rashan, without thinking, stepped into the circle with them and started to twitch along.

  Volume plus beat equaled joy of pain, the fiercer the more ecstatic. If the walls did not sweat and your eyeballs fry, if you could taste your own mouth next morning, it was not true house. ‘Takes a sickness to ride the high,’ Benny said. ‘Soak up the punishment, then bounce it back.’

  ‘Fight the Power,’ said MoRitz.

  ‘Right,’ said Benny. ‘And love it, too.’

  They went clubbing from midnight till dawn, Thursday through the weekend. On this sidewalk outside Big Mac’s, they’d meet to collude and conspire, rehashing the night before, charting routes for the one ahead. Mostly they followed their favorite deejays, Clark Kent and Kid Capri. Tonight, the word was, the Kid was due at Powerhouse: ‘Bird’s the word,’ said Rashan.

  His left eyelid still drooped, a half-shut blind, and his speech was hesitant, as if the words had been learned by rote, a foreign language too systematically mastered to sound quite his own. But dancing, MoRitz said, he was just beautiful. On the floor, where there were no rules, no limitations, he was whatever he made himself – a corkscrew or a stormblown sail, a pissing dog, a samurai: ‘A mighty man,’ Benny said.

  ‘A warrior,’ said Rashan.

  On this sidewalk gathered the house elite, a loose-knit inner circle that called itself the Corps. Most of its conscripts were refugees from street gangs and the projects, who had refused to be typecast. Instead of festering in the neighborhoods and getting dead, they’d dared to bust out, play Broadway: ‘Ax for more,’ said MoRitz.

  He was a Barbadian from Washington Heights, born to shrug, with a MO KNOWS Messagehead. If you were down with the Corps, he said, you had it made. So Rashan had it made. ‘But that don’t make it easy. It’s not,’ MoRitz said.

  ‘Snot meant to be,’ Benny said.

  ‘No pain, no brain,’ Rashan said.

  Across the street, against the wall of the Hebrew Union College, the homeless men still sat in line and stared. The man in the pink blanket was crouched at the far left. He kept rocking on his heels, shouting Fuck that shit, Fuck that shit. Then he came lurching across Broadway. Up close, there was blood on his lips, in his mouth, and he stopped right in front of Rashan, stood swaying and mouthing, his forefinger stabbing the air. ‘Who he?’ Benny asked.

  ‘Just one of my fathers,’ said Rashan. Deadpan, he turned away, began to pose in Big Mac’s plate-glass window. ‘Only kidding,’ he said. But the man in pink was not amused. Reddish froth clung to his chaps, blood red was in his eyes. Shooting out his right hand, he grabbed Rashan by his spotted cravat, pulled him close. ‘And who the fuck,’ he cried, ‘are you?’

  ‘I Am The Jam,’ Rashan said.

  Freeing himself, he moved off down Broadway. It was early yet, hours to go before Powerhouse got going, and he needed rest. Outside Tower Records, where Cleveland Blakemore was dismantling his book display, Rashan bought a Sesame Street picturebook. There was a young lady off Seward Park; her name was Candy; she was teaching him to read. ‘Rough sledding,’ he said. ‘But I endure.’

  He was so long of leg, he seemed to be walking on stilts. At Great Jones Street, young girls in bright dresses were sucking on Popsicles, young boys were watching them. A boombox blasted My Generation: ‘Who wrote that?’ Rashan asked. ‘Elvis Presley? The Beatles?’

  ‘Pete Townshend.’

  ‘That a fact? I knew it was some dead mother.’ Unsmiling, he started to move away, turned left into the night. ‘It always is,’ he said.

  15

  A street-sweeper lounged in Union Square. Leaning on his broom, immaculate in new coveralls and designer sneakers, he looked like an Ivy Leaguer slumming, and that’s what he proved. His name was Calvin Palmer, his alma mater, Cornell. A Wall Street broker with Merrill Lynch, he had lately been convicted on drug charges. The nimbleness of lawyers had kept him out of jail. In lieu, he was performing community service.

  Leaning on a broom was the least of it. Most of his sentence, Calvin said, was spent babysitting trees. Plant-pirates were marauding the city parks, ripping off shrubs and saplings, every growing thing. Barbed wire and chains had failed to prevent them. So had grappling the roots with buried spikes. Now it was up to Calvin Palmer. ‘I have to stand sentry,’ he said. ‘Then when the thief shows up and starts molesting a tree, I blow on a little tin whistle.’

  ‘What happens then?’

  ‘He takes the tree,’ Calvin said, ‘and he goes away.’

  It was draining work. Some nights he was so tired, so absolutely fed up with it all, he couldn’t face dining out. The rest of his set, Bush Leaguers, were living it up at Mortimer’s or some Young Republican fundraiser, while he suffered cold cuts in his bedroom and watched reruns of Cheers. And still he had a hundred hours to work off. His broom was clogged with sticky black glop, God knew how it had got there; he had a blood blister on one heel. ‘Free Calvin Palmer,’ he said.

  ‘There’s no such thing,’ said Lush Life.

  Union Square was her new playing field. Tommy Blalock, his stint in the navy completed, had taken rooms in Brooklyn Heights and was working on Fourteenth Street, selling T-shirts off an army-surplus blanket.

  His pitch sat tight to the entrance to the IRT, the very spot where he and Vida Lujuriante had first pledged to go shopping for shoes. Scaffolding and a low ceiling of wooden boards gave it a subterranean feeling, cool and musty like a cellar. In the recesses of its deep shade, Nigerians sold beads and Senegalese sold tape cassettes, a Korean sold Oyster Perpetuals. But T-shirt vendors were steadily cutting them back.

  The shirts themselves were not Tommy’s choice. If he’d had his druthers, he would have featured his own travel trophies, souvenirs of Louisiana and Virginia, Caracas, Singapore, a dozen other stopovers. His favorite came right from New Iberia, his own hometown – a McIlhenny’s Tabasco shirt, with the red-pepper bottle burning up in hellfire and flame-licked letters proclaiming HOT STUFF.

  ‘Tommy comes from an artistic bent. All his family do,’ Lush Life said. But street sellers must take what they were allotted: white Bart Simpsons and black Bart Simpsons, MOM AND DAD WENT TO THE BIG APPLE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT, a hundred variations on I ♡ NEW YORK. ‘Demeaning,’ Tommy thought it. ‘Tossing the cowchip.’

  ‘We have each other,’ Lush Life said.

  He only grunted. He was a creature of strong attachments, fierce pride. His mother, who had raised him, had taught him never to take second best. That was why he had joined the navy. Be All That You Can Be, the army urged. But Tommy would not settle fo
r so little. ‘All you can be, and then some,’ was his own belief. ‘One hundred and ten percent.’

  His speech was heavy on footballese, the jargon of pigskin war. Every play of his life seemed fourth and inches, goal to go: ‘This is the big one. There are no tomorrows. For Tommy Blalock,’ he said, ‘this is the one for all the marbles.’

  ‘Hut, hut,’ said Lush Life. But she was no longer Lush Life, not really, or even Vida Lujuriante. Outside the Hotel Moose, she was just Tommy Blalock’s girl. ‘His intended,’ she said.

  Or so she trusted. For the moment, no rings had changed hands, no vows were exchanged. It was Tommy Blalock’s belief that a man did not plight his troth till he could pay his way. ‘No property of Tommy Blalock’s is going to end up on no damn welfare line. That isn’t the way Tommy Blalock was raised,’ he said.

  ‘His mother is a dental assistant,’ Lush Life supplied.

  ‘My mother,’ said Tommy, ‘is a saint.’

  One long summer’s toil, he reckoned, and he would achieve a basic stake, down payment on a little house someplace near his mother’s house, maybe even enough to get a start in construction. ‘Ten grand and we have first down. Move the chains, stop the clock,’ he said. Till then, he practiced strict economy. He even hesitated at sex. ‘Roughing the passer,’ he called it. ‘You get caught one time, it’s a major penalty. You get caught again, it might be a game ejection.’

  Lush Life did not argue. In her secret heart, she was relieved. ‘Don’t ask,’ she said. For years, she had been meaning to go to a plastic surgeon. She had saved up, even set a date. Then she’d run into International Chrysis, the Brazilian transsexual, in the ladies’ room at Mars. Her measurements, proudly proven, were 38, 24, 36, and 9. Lush Life was awestruck, enraptured. First thing next morning, however, she had canceled her doctor’s appointment. ‘C’est magnifique, mais c’est pas la guerre,’ she said. Besides, she was scared of needles.

  For herself, she had no regrets. But what about Tommy? What if he was disappointed? ‘Those Southern momma’s boys, you know how they love big chests,’ she said. ‘They’re udderly crazed.’ In her room, she lit candles and stripped, breathed out like a highboard diver. But her mirror was too cheap to lie. ‘He won’t like me. He won’t approve,’ she said. Glinting in the candlelight, Night Train ran down her sleek flanks like oil, an unguent. Her nipples were rosy and hard, no fatter than an infant’s. ‘Ladybeard, I’m not right,’ said Lush Life. She flung herself down on her pallet; she hid her ribs in Madame Butterfly’s silks. ‘I never will be,’ she said.

  The black mood did not sustain. The morning after, beneath the scaffold at Union Square, she dazzled in and out of sunlight like a snapdragon, singing stridently off-key. From Cio-Cio-San and Nagasaki, she’d made a right turn into Nelly Forbush and Bali Hai, In Love with a Wonderful Guy: ‘I’m as corny as Kansas in August,’ she blared, a vision in white shorts and boater, a navel-knotted, sky-blue shirt. ‘High as a flag on the Fourth of July.’

  Her feet in open-toed gilded sandals were torpedoes, yet she floated through the Farmer’s Market like Mary Martin on a tightrope. ‘No more a smart little tart with no heart,’ she sang. On the corner of Sixteenth Street, outside the Metropolis Cafe, she stuffed her face with Tootsie Rolls. The blockage muffled her voice, but could not still it. ‘Kansas in August,’ she crooned. ‘I’m as normal as blueberry pie.’

  Union Square, like NoHo, was not so much changing as reverting. It had started brilliantly, gone through a long passage of dimness, and was just beginning to flourish again. Coming to it from below was like surfacing from Atlantis.

  By now the physical business of walking Broadway had settled into one pattern, endlessly repeated. For days and miles on end, you quarried underwater, passed along a bottomless tunnel. But periodically – Trinity Church, City Hall Park, Canal Street – the darkness broke, and you floundered into light. Most often, these breaks came without warning. At Union Square, however, the rest was signaled four blocks in advance, where the road broke stride, hitched a sudden dogleg.

  According to legend, this was Hendrick Brevoort’s doing. He was a Dutch tavernkeeper of the early nineteenth century and, as Broadway kept pushing north, its proposed route had run through his apple orchard. In that orchard, he had a favorite tree, which the planners wished to cut down. And Brevoort had flatly refused. Architects, master builders, City Hall delegations had come to him pleading; the innkeeper would not be budged. In the end, Broadway was rerouted, went lurching off to its left.

  That, at least, was the story. If true, Brevoort’s apple tree had changed the whole of Manhattan’s topography. Without it, Broadway would have run into Fourth Avenue, the two combined would have made Park Avenue, and the Rialto would have been an East Side show. Instead, it went west, invaded the creeks and untouched farmlands of Bloomingdale: ‘To flaunt itself,’ Dr Davitt said, ‘and make a mock.’

  His own flaunting was discreet. A willowy youth of fifty, he wore lime-green chinos with a tight white sweater, rose-tinted glasses, just a hint of eyeshadow. In his shoulder bag, he carried a deck of printed cards, deep purple ink on a plain cream ground. DR DAVID DAVITT, the cards announced, WORD-SURGEON.

  This was not his only commercial. Neatly fanned into separate pouches, like the segments of a purpled mandarin, there were also testimonials for DR DAVITT, COSMOLOGIST; DOCTOR DAVID, YOUR PAIN IS MY PLEASURE; and DAVE’S CARPENTRY, CLOSET CASES OUR SPECIALITY. But the word-surgeon was his favorite. ‘Master Writing with the Master Writer. Produce Deathless Prose,’ said the card, and then, in gold copperplate letters, ‘How Can You Lose with the Muse I Use?’

  They were, he admitted, just teases. Back in the sixties, before the pulp-magazine market collapsed, he had been Brett Houston, short-order scribe. So Young, So Lovely, So Dead, Pardon My Corpse, and The Morgue the Merrier were just three of his. He had even knocked off a novella, unpublished, called You’ll Be Sorry. But his own writings had failed to satisfy him. Deepest down, he’d always felt that he was a teacher: ‘Born to preach, not practice,’ he said. So Dr Davitt was born: ‘My mother’s maiden name, my first love’s profession.’

  He placed classifieds in True Detective and Jet, wrote up a two-page prospectus. ‘Is this feeling familiar?’ it began. ‘Did you ever finish reading a literary classic and think to yourself I could have written that? Did you ever feel, if only you had the necessary know-how, that you too contained the seeds of a timeless masterwork? If so, READ ON, for help is at hand. Dr David Davitt, world-famed word-surgeon, is here to show you how you, too, can unlock the door to genius… .’

  He had printed up five thousand Free Introductory Booklets. But the ads had failed to generate a serious response. ‘Which is my life’s history,’ the Doctor said now. ‘I meant it for real. I always mean it for real. But somehow, I don’t know why, I make it come out sounding phony. It’s like a tic, some kind of nervous reflex. So everyone thinks it’s a put-on, a great big yuk. And all the time – this is so sick – it is my heart out there.’

  The failure to communicate had hit him hard. ‘Give me half an hour each day, just thirty little minutes, in the privacy of your own home,’ the Master Writer’s prospectus promised, ‘and you, too, can soar with the eagles, weave word-dreams for pleasure and profit.’ But he received only two replies. ‘One from a retired banker in Wisconsin, a spiritualist, who was trying to reach Pierre Louys,’ Dr Davitt said. ‘And the other was from my half-brother in Panama City, he wanted three thousand dollars.’

  Looking back, though he’d tried to shrug it off, the experience had been his life’s watershed. Afterwards, he ceased to write for profit, drew back on himself. For the last eighteen years, he had been working intermittently on a history-cum-daybook of Union Square, News on the Rialto. He did not expect to complete it in his own lifetime.

  He was a little trim man, freshly laundered, but his cheeks had a mottled cast, blue where they should have turned pink, like a failed litmus test. He’d lived in this same neighborhood, off and on
, from the age of eleven months.

  When his mother left his father, a Long Island City pharmacist, she went to work in S. Klein’s, the bargain clothing store on Union Square East, where the Zeckendorf Towers now stood, and she roomed on East Eleventh. Now eighty-three and wheel-chaired, she was still in the same apartment. So was her son, the Doctor.

  ‘Call me Davitt. I want you to,’ he said. But his mother called him Hyman. Among his first memories was his infant self, aged three years and seven months, standing screeching on Fourteenth Street, right outside Lüchow’s, screaming I’m not Hyman. I’m not, I’m not. For years afterwards, he couldn’t walk that block, or he’d be swarmed instantly by packs of street urchins, guttersnipes, squawling I’m not Hyman, I’m not.

  What was the neighborhood like back then? ‘Dispossessed,’ he said. Somewhere it had lost its charter. In News on the Rialto, the Doctor wrote: ‘Union Square was to be the last word. All Broadway led up to this place. This was the place where the city was going to end. Where everything would end. It would be the flower forever. Only everything would not stop growing. It moved on beyond.’

  It left behind a dumping ground. Looking back into childhood, what Dr Davitt remembered most clearly was mess, a perpetual morning-after feel. ‘It was like there’d been the party to end all parties, only nobody had bothered to clear up,’ he said. ‘So all the dirty glasses and the leftover food, the party favors, the funny hats, they’d just sat there and gone bad.’ He sniffed the stale air, wrinkled up his nose in distaste. ‘It was a hole,’ he said, ‘where a place used to be.’

  The days of Union Square’s greatest glory had followed the Civil War. For thirty years then, it had been the Rialto; the hub. Solidly from Eighth Street to Twenty-third, Broadway was lined with smart hotels and smarter stores, the strip called Ladies Mile. Tiffany’s was here; so were Colonel John Daniell, Arnold Constable, and Lord & Taylor. But Union Square’s greatest stardom was as the heart of the theater district.