The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  Behind the counter stood a lone salesperson. She was not young, not large, but she did not need to be: Her eye was a lance, a steel-tipped harpoon. One glance at the babbling Zim, and it impaled him as he stood, knee-deep in Mirth and Novelties (Miscellaneous). Gordon’s was strictly wholesale, the lady said. Street persons and lunatics, the implication was, need not apply.

  Sasha wheedled and cajoled, he blustered, he pleaded. When none of these bore fruit, he asked to see the management: ‘What is happen to Master of Merriment?’ he demanded.

  ‘He got a goiter.’

  We walked on sadder, slower. At Coffee Shop, a Brazilian rookery full of Scandinavian models and the Monegasque unemployed, Sasha sat down groaning beneath a Day-Glo voodoo goddess. ‘Novokuz,’ he said. His cafe con leche had the color and consistency of a sperm sample. It matched his mood. ‘Bad day at Black Rock, worse on White Way,’ he said. The mugging had dented his bone, but it was his psyche that stung. ‘Is most hurt my feelings,’ he said.

  How to explain? It just seemed wrong, was all. A case of mistaken identity. Beatings and robbings, street horrors – that was stuff that happened to strangers, outsiders. But Sasha, who so loved Broadway, was surely exempt. ‘Like marrying Miss America and you go to bridal suite, she’s taking off wedding gown, veil, everything, beautiful in mirror like Princess Grace, then she turns round, ta-da, oh brudder, is Madame Brezhnev.’ He shoveled sugar in his cup, four spoons. ‘Is breaking spell.’ He added a fifth. ‘Giving pause,’ he said, ‘for concern.’

  At the very least, it was a watershed. He had given up his taxi – ‘Once shy, twice bitten’ – and was mulling his future. In his hospital ward, the next bed had been occupied by a part-time magician, a senior citizen called Max Gambon, who’d worked forty years in a bank but now performed at parties and weddings, bar mitzvahs. He’d shown Sasha a few easy moves, and Sasha had been entranced. Maybe that was a sign. The Great Zim. It had a ring. Or maybe not.

  Sugar and froth overflowed the cup, started drooling across our table. At this, Sasha spread his hands palms up, as if divining a bad omen. Hastily rising, he scattered loose change like witches’ salt, strong to unjinx hexes, and drew me back towards fresh air. ‘Too careful to be,’ he said. ‘You can’t.’

  On Broadway, the scenes of last night’s roisterings were now blindfold, shut up tight. Postcoital melancholia hung on the street like bad breath, a sour seed. Cruel, cruel torture. In the country of the castrate, the one-eyed snake is king. Tired Butterfly. Mamzelle Champagne. ‘What of you are thinking?’ Sasha asked.

  ‘Cocks,’ I said.

  From an upstairs rehearsal room, an old woman’s voice drifted down, halfway between speech and song, to the tune of ‘Kerry Dance.’ ‘Time goes on, and the happy years are dead,’ it said. The phrasing was hesitant, infinitely weary. ‘Oh, for one of those nights of madness,’ it sighed. ‘Oh, to think of it. Oh, to dream of it.’ The voice cracked, trailed off, tried again. ‘Dream of it. Dream of it.’ There was silence. Then the voice rose again. ‘Oh, to dream of it.’ A beat. ‘Fills my heart. My heart.’ Another. ‘It fills my heart with tears.’

  17

  A gun went off. Outside the Hotel Martinique, corner of Broadway and Thirty-second, a woman screamed. Across the street, something large and heavy was hurled into a newsstand. A young white man stumbled out blindly into traffic, blood running from a head wound, dripping through his fingers onto his Keith Haring CRACK IS WHACK T-shirt. Then a pack of black youths came wilding through Herald Square in hooded tracksuits, and a Greek pushcart was overturned. Souvlaki kebabs and cans of soda scattered every whichway. The black youths began to pound on car roofs and windows. A rock smashed into a taxi windshield. Inside, Bert Randolph Sugar chewed wetly on a Black Watch cigar. ‘Would Tyson have beaten Ali? Not a chance,’ he said.

  ‘A lucky punch?’ I hazarded.

  ‘Forget it,’ said Bert. ‘Ali would have been too fast, too ringwise. He’d have boxed Tyson dizzy, drawn his sting, then put him away around the eighth, maybe sooner.’

  A few yards ahead, a black child with a shaven skull lay half on the curb, half in the gutter. His left leg was drawn up and twisted beneath him, and he was mouthing words that we could not make out. When another rock came flying, Bert paid off the taxi, stepped out on the sidewalk. He wore a chocolate-brown fedora, brim furled, with a wide black band. Beneath it, his cigar hung soggy, obscene. ‘Joe Louis, of course,’ he said. ‘Now that’s a different matter.’

  Inside O’Reilly’s Pub, it was Happy Hour.

  Bert’s office – a table, a well-worn banquette, a picture of the Killarney Lakes – was in a side room, where Irish sausages and mash were served. Here he laid down his burden, a heavy satchel filled with Xeroxed articles on Bert Randolph Sugar, and he picked up a double Cutty Sark. ‘Gentlemen, start your engines,’ he said. So the long voyage began.

  He was a famous man. His own publicity called him the Guru of Sports, and he had published some fifty books, among them 100 Years of Boxing, Baseball’s 50 Greatest Games, Hit the Sign and Win a Free Suit of Clothes from Harry Finklestein, The Life and Times of Harry Houdini, The Horseplayer’s Guide to Winning Systems, and The Baseball Trivia Book to End All Baseball Trivia Books, Promise! Above all, he had edited Ring, the bible of Boxing. Under his aegis, it had been a model of everything that fight magazines should be and never were – fast, funny, devoutly disrespectful. So he had been fired: ‘Dismissed,’ he said, ‘with obloquy, ignominy, opprobrium.’

  For some years thereafter, his fortunes had stood at low tide. He’d kept himself afloat by churning out trivia books and dealing sports memorabilia; he had plotted lawsuits; he had dreamed of his return. In those mean times, O’Reilly’s had been his Elba, this table his safe harbor. ‘They carried me longer than my mother,’ he said. Now the first of his lawsuits had been heard and won, and he was back on high. He was editor and publisher of Boxing Illustrated; he starred on cable TV. He even paid his bar tabs.

  It was much to celebrate, and celebrations were what Bert was best at. A large, wet man, his face all mouth and bloodshot eyes, he was possessed of very great hungers, even greater thirsts, and his acts were scaled to match. When he sang, he caterwauled; when he danced, he dervished. And when he laughed, which was virtually nonstop, he would unleash a Godzilla roar, a widemouthed juddering blast that ripped through brick walls and plate-glass windows, drowned all that stood in its path. At its coming, strong men dove for cover, else they were mowed down in a machine-gun hail of spittle, cigar ash, used whiskey.

  On this night at O’Reilly’s, however, the killer laugh was stilled. Instead, holding up a frayed patch of newsprint, Bert mopped himself with the red foulard kerchief that he always wore plumed in his breast pocket. Cursing, he spat out pellets of chewed cigar like dead mosquitoes, his big mouth screwed tight with disgust. ‘This is the saddest story,’ he said.

  ‘What story?’

  ‘They’re closing the Harmony.’

  I knew the place of old. Formerly the Melody, upstairs on Broadway at Forty-eighth, it was the last of the old-style burlesque clubs, where the girls still had dimples and tassels, ‘The Stripper’ was the one true anthem forever, and the darkness was warm, all-embracing. ‘Would a pilgrimage be in order?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah,’ said Bert. ‘Let’s just go see the old dump.’

  Sentimental journeys were his stock in trade. Sometime back in the fifties, when still an undergraduate, he’d been let loose on Broadway for just one night. That night had ended with him and Jerry Lewis, arm in arm, tap dancing down the Great White Way, the Stem. They’d followed the white traffic lines all the way from the Winter Garden to Forty-second Street, past the Latin Quarter, past Lindy’s and Dempsey’s, the Paramount and the Capitol and the Palace, the Times Tower Ribbon, Bond’s with its lingerie Amazons, the Automat and Schrafft’s Spanish Garden, the Astor Hotel and its roof garden, the Orpheum and Honeymoon Lane, Siegmund Klein’s Internationally Famous Gymnasium, the Paddock Bar and Grill,
the Tango Palace and the Brass Rail, the shooting galleries and penny arcades, the dime-a-dance ballrooms, the tattoo parlors, the magic shops, the orange stands and the pineapple stands, and the movie billboards much larger than any life, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, The Incredible Shrinking Man, East of Eden, And God Created Woman, and Douglas Leigh’s Camels sign, its eight-foot mouth blowing smoke ring after perfect smoke ring, and the Pepsi-Cola sign with the electric waterfall, and the golden peanuts raining down, and the Budweiser Clydesdales prancing, and the neon hands waving and neon feet dancing and neon mouths roaring, kissing, chomping, laughing, the whole crazed tumult and incandescence, the hundred million lightbulbs flashing, the hucksters and panhandlers, the hipsters and tipsters, and the women, the women, the women. ‘So that’s it,’ Bert had thought, and he’d been tap dancing ever since.

  The greater part of his life’s work and passion had been spent in freezing and reproducing that moment. To aid him, he had created a second self: Broadway Bert; the Hat.

  Of his first self, Herbert, he spoke but grudgingly. Under interrogation, he would yield up that he’d been raised middle-class in Washington, DC; that the Randolphs were a first family of Virginia and the Sugars, the Kukars, Hungarian peddlers of pots and pans; that his grandfather had been a Southern merchant baron; and that he himself had once studied law. He had even done time on Madison Avenue. But none of this had signified. At the age of eight, he’d heard a radio thriller starring a tough-guy sleuth named Bert and had changed his name by law, forging his mother’s permission. He was not designed to walk straight, he’d always known that. The only question was where and when he would go askew. ‘Broadway,’ he said. ‘The name of the cankered rose.’

  For years the two selves cohabited. Herbert earned his living, got married and sired a son, and in time moved upstate to Chappaqua, a suburb east of the Hudson; Bert took over after dark. But a time came when off-hours weren’t enough. He wanted to wear a hat. He knew that all the great writers – Damon Runyon, Walter Winchell, Jimmy Cannon, even the young Red Smith – wore hats. The composing rooms at their newspapers were situated directly above their desks. If their scalps were not covered, printers’ ink would drip through the cracks in the ceilings and spill into their eyes, blinding them to proper syntax. Or so he had heard. So he quit his job in advertising, took over Ring. He bought himself five fedoras for winter, five panamas for summer. Only then, he began to write.

  It suited him. On his own admission, he was not built for stamina, so that his work ran strongest in wind sprints. But the best of his leads were deathless: ‘The first time I saw machismo die a little came when, as a kid seated in front row of the old Savoy Theatre in Washington, DC, I saw John Wayne kiss a girl instead of his horse. The second time came when Roberto Duran told the whole world to kiss off in the eighth round of his fight with Sugar Ray Leonard.’ Or again, ‘It was as unbelievable as Santa Claus suffering from vertigo, as Captain Bligh dying from sea sickness, as Mary having a little lamb… .’

  First and always, the key was celebration; pure blood pleasure. To Bert, Broadway remained the Great White Way forever, its fascinations infinite, its lures unfailing. He loved its ratty sidewalks and its poisoned air, its decomposing temples, its crypts and cenotaphs, its epics, its monstrosities, its farces. He loved its denizens, he loved its stories, and he loved its lines, the more bewhiskered the better. First and last, he loved the word itself: ‘Broadway,’ he said. ‘If you have to ask, I can’t tell you.’

  It was a split life. Up in Chappaqua, so live witnesses claimed, Herbert Sugar was a modest man, of shy and retiring habit, his bald head covered with freckles and his laugh dry as burned toast. With his hats safely locked in the trunk of his car, he did not even drink much. His wife owned a flower shop; his son was in college. On Sundays, the family attended Episcopalian service. Afterwards, Herbert dozed in his den, stretched out in his La-Z-Boy, or read an improving book. At dusk, he tended his garden.

  Come the dawn, however, he would rise up singing and drive on three wheels to the station, dressing and shaving as he went. Unleashing the hat du jour from its captivity, he’d angle it low above his left eye, pat its dimple and smooth its brow, furl it once, furl it twice, then give it one last tug for luck and, bounding up the station stairway two steps at a time, hit any carriage that would have him. Before the train doors were even shut, a deck of cards would appear in his left hand, a silvered hip-flask in his right. ‘My deal, I believe,’ said the Hat.

  So he Broadwayed. Up and down the Rialto, from saloon to saloon, from gymnasium to coffee stand to walk-up office to naked street corner, he did his rounds, told his tales. Half the citizens bowed at his passing, the other half ducked. Either way, his passage was ceremonial, a one-man parade.

  Now we journeyed towards the Harmony.

  When we left O’Reilly’s, it was getting dark of an April evening and a light rain fell. Outside the Hotel Martinique, all was quiet except for a few stray lawmen idly rounding up the usual suspects.

  The Martinique itself was a bastardized Loire chateau, topped with mansard roofs and bottomed with a fast-food joint. Originally, it had been a Broadway showpiece, a swankery, much favored by military brass on leave. More recently, it had been a welfare hotel. Now it was between incarnations, stood unoccupied. Security guards hung glumly in the lobby. A dumpster filled with plaster and broken glass blocked the door. ‘Used to be a ballroom upstairs. A fine romance,’ Bert said. ‘First dose of clap I ever caught.’

  He pulled me indoors. ‘Just follow the Hat,’ he said. At the top of a crescent stairway, there was indeed a ballroom, but the way in was barred by rubble. Behind it lurked a man with a toy gun. ‘You can’t come in. You can’t,’ he said. ‘You can’t come in.’

  ‘Wasn’t a great dose. Average at best,’ said Bert. ‘Still, it was the first – you never forget your first.’

  The man was neatly made, perfumed. He wore the remnants of a brown suit, double-breasted with wide lapels and a high pinch waist. His yellow hair was waved and oily, and he had the whitest false teeth. ‘This isn’t my job. I don’t have to do this,’ he said. The toy gun shook in his hand. He looked on the verge of tears. ‘I told them. It isn’t my job,’ he said. ‘I told them that.’

  ‘Laura, her name was,’ said Bert. ‘Good field, no hit.’

  We went back down the stairway. Waves of perfume, simultaneously saccharine and carrion, pursued us. When we touched bottom, the security guards were playing cards, three-card monte for pennies, on top of a dead TV. At the top of the stairs, the neat man still stood amid the rubble, watching us watching him. ‘Her brother was a featherweight,’ said Bert. ‘Couldn’t fight worth a damn.’

  Out in the street, the rain had hardened, we loitered in the doorway of J. J. Hats. Its windows were riotous with Stetsons and Borsalinos, porkpies, derbies and deerstalkers, slouches and wide-awakes, and, of course, wide-brimmed fedoras, stingy-brim panamas. Bert Sugar lit a fresh Black Watch. His face beneath the furled hatbrim was swollen, fat with glee. ‘Don’t you just hate cheap perfume?’ he said.

  For the first few blocks, headed uptown, we trod water. Herald Square had once been the heart of all things showbiz. This, not Times Square, had been the original Great White Way. Tin Pan Alley was just below it, the Metropolitan Opera House, that yellow-brick brewery, just above. Great newspapers, the Herald and Horace Greeley’s Tribune, stared each other down across the square; Macy’s rose monumental to the west; while straight ahead, stretching all the way to Times Square, was an unbroken line of theaters and hotels, mauve cafés and scarlet saloons, perpetually at dazzle in this night that outshone any sun.

  The names alone made a psalmody: Frohman’s Empire and Browne’s Chop House, the hotels Albany, Continental, and Knickerbocker, the Weber and Field’s Music Hall, Daly’s and Garrick’s, Palmer’s and Miner’s, sky-gouging electrical signs for Budweiser and Edison Phono, the Kid McCoy Saloon, the original Real McCoy, and gaudiest, most fantastical of all, The Fiery Chariot Race in
New York, a construct of twenty thousand lightbulbs, so artfully disposed that the pre-neon chariots seemed actually to circle, the horses to gallop, the dust and sand to fly.

  Among the theaters, the palm went to the Moorish-turreted Casino, at the southeast corner of Thirty-ninth. There, on November 12, 1900, Florodora had opened, featuring the Florodora Sextette, and made Broadway BROADWAY, a synonym for the stage.

  According to Allen Churchill’s The Great White Way, the fuss was all about one ‘brief scene built around a gentle tune called Tell Me, Pretty Maiden. To the first easy strains of this, six girls trip from one side of the Casino stage. Each is identical in height and weight, attired in matching black ostrich-plume hats and frilly pink walking costumes, with parasols gracefully over shoulders. Simultaneously, six exceedingly handsome young men in gray frock coats and gray top hats saunter from the other side of the stage. Politely doffing silk toppers, the young gentlemen melodically inquire, Tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you? In charming unison, the six pretty maidens chorus back, There are a few, kind sir, and pretty girls and proper, too.’

  Hardly a hanging matter, one might think. But there was yet more to come. At the end of their number, the maidens smiled and exited. As they did so, they winked. And this – the wink – drove the audience to delirium. The Sextette was hauled back for an encore, then a second, then a dozen more. Within the hour, they had become the most famous and desirable sirens in New York: ‘They are goddesses,’ one critic wrote, ‘the first of their class to immortalize the chorus girl.’