The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  The context was that she was upping sticks. She wore her favorite Debbie Reynolds, Tammy and the Bachelor, a frilly confectioner’s frock with matching pumps and a pink-veiled toque, and her suitcase sat fat in her hand. Down the street, at Tad’s Steaks, Tommy Blalock was waiting with the tickets. Together they were booked, train and bus, all the way through to New Iberia. He was taking her home to meet his mom.

  The night before, packing up her trousseau at the Hotel Moose, she had kept playing an old Frank Sinatra record: ‘Love and marriage, love and marriage,’ Lush Life sang along, ‘go together like a horse and carriage.’

  It made her sad; she did not know why. Long as she could remember, she had yearned for this style of romance. But now that she’d achieved it, all she felt was estrangement: ‘Like it happened to some person else.’

  Her suitcase was full of flimsies. The way she had it figured, a honeymoon lasted four nights. So she’d packed four colors of negligees – ‘White for Ingrid Bergman, black for Cyd Charisse. Scarlet satin for Mamie van Doren. And amber forever’ – and four silk teddies. Four wigs, push-up bras, and sets of false eyelashes. And four lace handkerchiefs, for waving hello and good-bye.

  In the dark of her room, she laid out her earthly possessions. The clothes she packed, and the rest she left. ‘Dead letters,’ she said. ‘Take your pick.’

  There were back copies of Glamour and Cosmopolitan; there were three empty bottles of Night Train. There were Polaroids of Lush Life with Velma, Lush Life with Denise Denise, Lush Life with International Chrysis and Vanessa the Undresser. There was a dog-eared copy of 1001 Diseases, a burned-out coffee pot, a cardboard box full of Christmas decorations. And a child’s doll in a baby-pink ballet dress.

  Down the hall, Petros Kassimatis was rhythmically bouncing a guest back and forth off the garden wall. The guest, a small brown man, did not protest, didn’t utter a sound. As I passed, Petros paused in mid-bounce. ‘Unseasonably hot for May,’ he said, and dropped his guest on the floor. The brown man lay still, his left leg bent back double. ‘Smells like rain,’ Petros said. Wearily, he spat against the wall. Yellow spittle, thick with phlegm, clung to the vines. ‘Hard to say for sure,’ Petros said.

  I had done with Struggles and Triumphs. Now I was immersed in South with Scott. I had reached the part where Captain Scott’s Antarctic Expedition of 1911 arrives at the South Pole only to find that Amundsen, the Norwegian, has beaten them to it. Heartsick, they take a few snapshots and share a can of seal meat, then start on the endless trek back to home base. But the weather worsens; the world is blotted out by blizzards. Captain Titus Oates, most faithful and beloved of Scott’s followers, comes down with frostbite. Soon he knows that he must die. He also knows that his prolonged suffering is holding back his comrades. Unless he dies faster, the whole party faces doom. So he rises up from the nightly writing of his journal, and he drags himself to the tent door. Each step is a crucifixion, but he does not flinch. His colleagues regard him in mute dismay, half-starved themselves, too sick to protest or even stir. Outside is eternal night. Quietly, Titus Oates raises the tent flap: ‘So ask,’ said Lush Life.

  She was dressed as a man.

  Or a schoolboy, rather; a tenth grader. She wore a wine-colored blazer with a wine-striped tie, a button-down cream shirt, gray flannels, and lace-up brogues, and instead of glugging Night Train, she was chomping on Juicy Fruit gum.

  Scrubbed free of makeup, her face glowed pink and white, an ad for the virtues of milk. ‘So how do I look?’ she asked.

  ‘Very nice,’ I replied.

  ‘But I’m not.’

  Hitching up her flannels at the knee, she sat on the edge of my bed, let her legs dangle free. ‘I’m not a sissy. I’m not,’ she said.

  She never had been. Back in Paterson, in elementary school, a boy called Juan Negron had called Geraldo Cruz that name and worse. ‘Dollface. Crybaby. Cocksucker,’ Juan Negron had called him. ‘Mamma’s boy.’ But Geraldo had changed Juan’s mind.

  Three blocks down the street from school, between a pizza stand and a pawnshop, there was an alley that led to waste ground. Juan Negron used it for a shortcut home, slid through it every day. So Geraldo waited in a doorway. Around him, there were garbage cans full of pizza trash, puddles thick and black with goop. In one puddle was a busted half-brick. And Juan Negron came walking.

  When he passed the doorway, Geraldo felled him with the half-brick. Then he rubbed his face in a black puddle; then he dropped him in a garbage can. Bits of pizza clung to Juan’s clothes and face, strands of melted cheese, globs of unbaked dough. He was not unconscious, just stunned. His mouth was stuffed full of anchovies and mushrooms, extra pepperoni, but he did not move. He never made a sound. Not even when Geraldo cut him.

  Outdoors, the wind had begun to rise. In the airshaft beyond my window, there were noises of whipping and howling. I tried to return to my book, but the storm sounds kept distracting me. When I looked up, Lush Life was crying.

  She did not weep like a woman but a child, a small, bullied boy. She ground her knuckles in her eyes. Snot came from her nose, got mixed with her tears. But she made no move to wipe herself; she only sat and cried.

  When the sobbing and snuffling stopped, she turned away, lay down among the marigolds. There was a hole in the sole of her left brogue. ‘Don’t look,’ she said. Then she turned back again, showed her face of her own accord.

  The pink and white was smeared black and gray. The eyes were swollen half-shut; the mouth hung loose and sodden. ‘Go ahead. Look all you want,’ Lush Life said. She wiped her nose on her wine-striped tie. She chomped her gum. ‘You can look,’ she said. ‘But you can’t see.’

  But that had been in the night, inside the Hotel Moose. By daylight, windblown in Times Square, she was tremulous, ecstatic. ‘I left you Madame Butterfly, Ladybeard,’ she cried. Her voice against the dry wind was a siren’s wail. ‘I won’t be needing it.’

  ‘And South Pacific?’

  ‘Goes with me.’

  As she wiggled across Forty-fourth Street, her hips roller-coasting at each step, a construction worker dropped to his knees before her. Hands clasped and eyes upturned, he cartooned the ardent swain. ‘One kiss. Just one kiss,’ he begged. But Lush Life, dimpling, only shook her platinum head. ‘I am promised,’ she said, ‘to another.’

  A redoubled gust sent her scudding downwind, tossed chaff. Cardboard boxes and aluminum trashcans chased each other down the sidewalks, and streetlights gleamed, malevolent sulfurous eyes, in the middle of the afternoon. HOLD ON TO YOUR SOUL, an evangelist’s placard proclaimed, IT IS PERISHABLE GOODS.

  So was all Times Square. It had been conceived on the fly, with a frontier-town’s haphazardness. After dark, neon masked the joins, washed all flaws in instant glamour. But by daylight it stood stripped, a pasteboard mess, all girders and pitprops, false fronts.

  It had been a shantytown always. In the nineteenth century, when it was called Longacre, it was a place of blacksmiths and stables, the center of the harness trade. The corner of Forty-second Street, where La Primadora Quality now stood, was then known as Thieves’ Lair. Period pictures show wide unpaved streets like pig wallows, shacks of loose board and kindling, and ragged men in doorways, at watch for the unwary. ‘So what all changed?’ asked Jimmy Glenn. Just the scale, and the choice of weapons.

  Easy money had come with the 1890s. Broadway as Rialto was now moving northwards at such a lick that the stretch from Thirty-fourth Street, deserted twenty-five years before, was already wedged solid. Unable to squeeze in below, Oscar Hammerstein I jumped the Deuce. At Forty-fourth Street, he opened the Olympia, three theaters in one plus the Paradise Roof Garden. The rest of the wolfpack followed close at heel.

  For the collector of farces, the Olympia’s opening in 1895 was a gem. Hammerstein, a portly little party with a Prince Albert frock coat, a Van Dyke, and a long black cigar, was an inveterate practical joker. Perhaps that was why he opted to launch his dream in late November, with rain and sleetsto
rms forecast.

  At the hour appointed, the five thousand first-nighters began to debouch from their carriages, resplendent in full evening fig. Mysteriously, they found the doors locked, their entry barred. Then the rain began. Soon it was a deluge. Milling around the sidewalk in their top hats and furs, the swells began to panic. ‘With the strength of a dozen catapults,’ wrote the Times, ‘they banged at the portals of the new palace of pleasure and sent them flying open.’ But their travails had only started. The stairwells were choked, impassable; the walls, freshly painted, were not yet dry. So the mob was striped red, yellow, and green. ‘Never mind. It’s only water colors,’ Oscar Hammerstein said, as they went stampeding over seats, stormed the empty stage. Yvette Guilbert had been announced as the opening attraction but, on the night, she was replaced by marionettes, a female impersonator, and a troupe of one-legged acrobats. Outdoors, as the sleet turned to hail, ‘puff sleeves wilted and crimped hair became hoydenish in the crush. Trousers were splashed, dresses were torn and still the crowd pushed on.’ In his private box, Hammerstein drank champagne. Having supped his fill of lobster, he lit up another cigar as the army of five thousand, defeated, ‘slid through the slush and mud of Longacre back into the ranks of Cosmopolis.’

  The following day, a pipe-joint burst open in the theater’s cellar, killing two and scalding many others. Times Square’s debut was complete.

  Unamazingly, the Olympia went bankrupt, and Hammerstein with it. But he bounced back in good order. By 1900, he and his son Willie had opened the Victoria, home of the Cherry Sisters. Billed as the worst act in America, the sisters sang and danced behind a proscenium net, to ward off the fruit and veg. Supporting them were, among others, Sarah Bernhardt and Charlie Chaplin, Lillie Langtry, the Marx Brothers and Fannie Brice, Houdini, W. C. Fields and, of course, Armand Kalisz, He with the Savoir Faire.

  Now the Hammersteins were unstoppable, and so was their neighborhood. For the next two decades, Times Square was Broadway, and Broadway seeming paradise. Marian Spitzer, the biographer of the Palace Theatre, wrote an aching description of herself as a small girl taken by her father to see Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish in a Forty-second Street matinee. Afterwards, they had hot chocolate at the Knickerbocker Hotel, where Caruso lived; then they strolled up Broadway through the glimmering dusk: ‘It was the day before Easter, and cold; fair but cold, and the wind whipped the ladies’ skirts way up above the tops of their eight-button shoes. The year was 1913 and no nice girls wore slippers on the street.’

  The stroll stretched only five blocks, but in that space they passed the Times Tower and the Victoria, Shanley’s lobster palace and Consodine’s Metropole, George M. Cohan’s and David Belasco’s, and the Paradise Roof Garden. And the Astor Hotel, its sidewalk lined with private carriages; and the Cadillac, where Eugene O’Neill was born; and George Rector’s at Forty-third, unmarked save for the illuminated griffin that hung above its doorway: the famous Rector’s, where Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell dined, and John Drew and the Barrymores, and all the Florodora maidens, each reigning beauty in turn posing by the revolving doors, then prancing to her table to the tune of her latest hit.

  It was an idyll inspired by Europe; a transplanted dream of boulevardiers. The world of Rector’s was essentially the world of Maxim’s or the Café Royal, a champagne-and-lobster playground in which the blue-blooded, the louche, the financial, and the artistic could wine and twine at random, and there was only one rule that did not exist to be broken: ‘Appearances must be observed,’ George Rector dictated, ‘or else Society founders.’

  That age had vanished with Prohibition. Once driven underground, Broadway had no more need to keep up fronts. The same peccadilloes that had once been hushed – nude showgirls popping out of birthday cakes at Sherry’s, Evelyn Nesbit on her red velvet swing – were now glorified. Far from guilty secrets, excess became a rallying point, a gesture of righteous defiance. Every night that Texas Guinan, Longacre’s new avatar, greeted her patrons at El Fay with her trademark cry of ‘Hello, Suckers,’ she stuck her tongue in Rector’s stately ear. ‘Appearances? In a pig’s eye,’ she was saying, more or less. ‘Society went thataway.’

  In one form or another, the sentiment had been echoing ever since. ‘What does Times Square mean? The freedom to say “Fuck You,”’ Bert Sugar said now. He considered his dead cigar, chewed idly at its corpse. ‘It is the American way.’

  At Jimmy’s Corner, he hung on the ropes, most horribly battered, but refused to take a count. May 1 was the date reserved for the Changing of the Hat. Lunch completed at O’Reilly’s, Bert stepped outside, ceremoniously removed his winter fedora and gave it to the first passerby in need. Then he crossed Broadway to J. J. Hats and selected a summer panama.

  This day his choice had fallen on a creamy wide-brim with a plain black band, brand-name Napoli. Inwardly rejoicing, he wore it outdoors, only to find the street rushing by in headlong panic, put to flight by the sirocco. Before he could get himself planted, a passing lamppost had unseated the new panama, sent it spinning and cavorting down Thirty-third. It had taken Bert three blocks to catch it up. When he did, he wished he hadn’t.

  The sodden remnant now sat on the bar. Smeared and bleared with toil, a ragged hole punched in its crown, it looked like nothing so much as Judy Garland’s stovepipe in Easter Parade. ‘See Naples. See Naples die,’ Bert said. Pouring him a double, Jimmy Glenn unlocked one owlish eye. ‘Lampposts,’ Jimmy said. It was a one-word history of grief.

  ‘A good man,’ Emile Griffith called Glenn; in boxing, there was no rarer praise. Jimmy’s father had been a preacher, and Jimmy had been raised to minister, to tutor and provide. As a young man, he had run an amateur gym in Harlem, pulling gang kids off Lenox Avenue. When the city took his building away, he traveled downtown.

  Apart from running the Times Square gym, he trained his own fighters there. Sometimes they had serious talent, the gloss of potential headliners. Then he was their surrogate father. He fed them and clothed them, schooled them, developed them into contenders. Two of them, Howard Davis and Terrence Alli, even fought for world championships. And then they left him. ‘Happens every time. The same old softshoe shuffle,’ Jimmy said. ‘Some wiseguy gets in their ear, promises them the world in a jug. So they walk. Forget where they come from, how they got from there to here. Stop training right, stop listening. Stop every damn thing but playing the fool. So soon they get their clocks cleaned. Then the wiseguys don’t know their right names, and they come back crawling. But what could I tell them? Too late, is all. You had your time. Now it’s not your time any more.’

  Outrage made his eyelids quiver. They soon subsided, relapsed into their usual bloodhound folds. But the poison remained. ‘You think betrayal doesn’t hurt? Let me tell you,’ Jimmy said, ‘it hurts.’ He had six children from his first marriage, and he’d put all of them through college. His son by his current marriage showed gifts as a cartoonist. Still, the lack of a champion, this sense of unfinished business, would not give him peace. ‘Giving up,’ he said, ‘that’s not something that impresses my mind.’ He had a new kid in hand, John Wesley Meekins, a good boy. A junior welterweight, good jab, good work habits. No drugs and no women troubles, no bad company to steer him wrong. ‘The total package. He’s got it all,’ Jimmy said. Twenty-one and one, sixteen KOs, with a wicked left hook: ‘And smart. Real smart,’ Jimmy said. His eyes were closed, his head lolled on his chest. ‘Can’t miss,’ Jimmy said. ‘He just can’t miss.’

  Jimmy’s Corner had become my uptown headquarters. Handy to the Hotel Moose, it also sat just three blocks from Hannah Sophia, the latest caretaker of Sasha’s drums. A muscular Teuton, and perhaps the only legitimate masseuse in Times Square history, Hannah outweighed the Soverican by a good twenty pounds, kept him tamed and close to heel. Only when she was busy, breaking backs and cracking necks all over Central Park West, did he get to come out and play. ‘Too old I am to be cutting mustard,’ he confessed. But he looked well fed, at peace. ‘I’m think
ing perhaps, in heart of my hearts, I am just pussycat,’ Sasha said.

  Jimmy’s Corner was the Times Square bar generic, a thin dark tube extending backwards into nothingness and the latrines. The surface of the bar was covered with Polaroids of roistering clients; there were old fight pictures on the walls; the barmaids wore hot pants and thigh boots. Christmas tinsel hung from the lowering ceiling twelve months a year.

  The block it looked out on, West Forty-fourth between Broadway and Sixth, was among the meanest in this mean neighborhood. But the Corner was sanctuary. ‘Anyone has trouble on their mind, I ask them please to reconsider,’ Jimmy Glenn explained, ‘and they have no trouble on their mind.’

  Whosoever entered here – hookers, messengers, taxi drivers, junkies, waiters, steeplejacks, scribes – checked their weapons at the door. While they rested, they murmured, genteel. Then, zealots refreshed, they went back into their trenches.

  Sasha’s spot was halfway down the long bar, foursquare in front of the Stolichnaya. He himself did not drink much, never had, because it made his nose bleed. Still, he liked the thought: ‘Is very Broadway, no?’

  ‘To get drunk?’

  ‘To be great star,’ he said, ‘and throw up on boots.’

  His head had healed fine, but the rest of him remained dubious. Before his mugging, he had seemed replete. It was enough for him just to be on Broadway and praise it all his days. But cheerleading had ceased to suffice him. He was worn down; he felt the need of something more.

  ‘To sleep, perchance to drum,’ he said. There was a band called the O’Fays, white boys who wished they were black. They rehearsed in a disused synagogue, way down in Loisaida, revamping old Stax and Volt hits from the sixties: Otis Redding, Ann Peebles and King Floyd, Booker T and Solomon Burke. Two of them came from Marseilles and two from New Orleans, one from Cracow, one more from Jakarta, the lead guitar from Elephant and Castle, the singer from Jersey City. And the drummer? ‘Novokuz.’