Downtown: My Manhattan

by Pete Hamill

  Eventually, all of that ended too, including the regret. I stopped drinking on January 1, 1973, and though I still visited my friends in the Head, it wasn’t the same. Oppenheimer had stopped drinking and so had Flaherty, the three of us costing the Head about a thousand dollars a week. In August 1974, Richard Nixon resigned as president, enmeshed in the Watergate scandals, and that was the true end of the sixties. On April 30, 1975, the war ended too, with the last Americans being lifted by helicopters off the roof of the embassy in Saigon. For a long while, the mood in the Head was diffuse, sometimes dark, particularly if you were looking with sober eyes. Some of the regulars walked out one midnight and were never seen again. Flaherty died. Oppenheimer died. Out in Queens, Kerouac died. Ginsberg died. Finally, the Head died too.

  And after each death, after the mourning was over, life continued. We didn’t just go to funerals; we went to weddings and christenings and seders, to graduations and birthday parties. We feasted. We danced. My friends all knew that we had shared a long hard time in our city, but it hadn’t hardened us. If anything, the bad times had given us a sense of proportion. Each of us refused to be trapped in the seductive mists of the past, where the endings were already known. We owned that past, but we lived in the present and still had visions of the future. On the day after my mother died, my first grandson was born.

  Yes: I work every day. I find time to visit art galleries and museums with my wife, to breakfast with my oldest friends, to walk alone through the streets of my native city. I love seeing the latest versions of Shaw’s girls in their summer dresses. I get emotional over the contests of the Knicks and the Mets. The phone rings and I absorb the latest gossip, and even believe about 10 percent of it. I see my brothers and collapse with them in laughter over the absurdities of politicians and other scoundrels. I read books I thought I’d read when young, and they are even better to me now, after having lived a life.

  I can be dazzled by the new, or repelled. But as a native New Yorker, I am also a citizen of the country of nostalgia. On days of gray rain, part of me wants to cross Broadway into Eighth Street on a summer evening and plunge into the carnival. I want to eat a lemon ice and stare into the window of a bookshop and see some volume that I cannot live without. I want to hear Tito Puente from a passing car and see two Latinas break into steps of amazing intricacy before walking on to the west, giggling. I want to bump into Joel Oppenheimer and see him light up a Gauloises and walk with him to the Lion’s Head on Sheridan Square, where the bar is full, and Paddy and Tom Clancy are in the back room and we all start singing “Eileen Aroon.” There is no clock on the wall. There is no time. We laugh, all of us, and everything seems possible. Later, I walk across town to a tiny flat on Second Avenue and Ninth Street and fall into a long dreamless sleep.

  Chapter Ten

  Crossroads of the World

  THE SUMMER I was sixteen I got a job in Times Square. I worked with a man named Butler, who was heavy, growly, with a whiskey-hurt Hell’s Kitchen face. He said he was fifty-one, but he looked seventy. Our job was to change the show cards in the lobbies of movie houses. Together we would pry out staples and take down the old show cards, which were five or six feet high, four feet wide, all in color. Good-bye, Joel McCrea; so long, Yvonne De Carlo. . . . Then I would hold the new show cards steady while Butler stapled them into place. Hello, Rita Hayworth; enjoy the run, Glenn Ford. Then Butler would have a nice long cigarette break before we moved to the next theater.

  I loved that job. There I was, at the crossroads of the world, with the breaking news moving around the face of the Times Tower and the waterfall flowing between the giant nude statues of the spectacular Bond Clothes display and smoke rings floating perfectly out of the mouth of the guy on the Camels sign. The sidewalks were jammed with sailors, pimps, cops, streetwalkers, dancers, actors, musicians, and tourists. Where Broadway crossed Seventh Avenue, traffic was a raucous, noisy show, big yellow taxis honking their horns like staccato punctuation from Gershwin, trucks and buses bullying their way downtown, and big New York voices coming out of the din: Whyncha watch where ya goin’, ya dope! Dis ain’t Joisey!

  One morning, Butler and I were standing under the marquee of the Victoria Theater while he pulled deep drags on a Lucky Strike. Coming down the street was a blind man, complete with dark glasses and tin cup, but no Seeing Eye dog. People dropped coins in the cup and hurried on, too busy for thanks. Then Butler flipped his butt into the street and gestured with his head toward the blind man.

  “Ya see dis guy?” he said. “Ya see him wit’ da cup and all? Well,” he said, the voice suddenly brimming with outrage, “I happen to know for a fact dat he’s got five percent vision in one eye!”

  I thought: This life business is not going to be easy.

  Even at sixteen, I was no stranger to Times Square. How could I be a stranger? I was a New Yorker, and this was the city’s central plaza. I’d been coming through here since 1942, when I was seven, on Saturday journeys with my mother and brother Tom. On my eleventh birthday, I was taken to see Maurice Evans in Hamlet, the first play I ever saw anywhere. I couldn’t understand the glorious Shakespearean language, but I was filled with confused, turbulent emotions put into me by the power of art. Those feelings stayed with me when the play was over as we walked through the dramatic tumult of the streets: limousines with heavy thumping doors, and cops on horses, and yellow Checker cabs, and thousands of men and women moving across honking traffic into bars and restaurants, and street musicians playing fiddles or drumming with spoons, and men with scary faces, and women in rouge. And there on the corner, the street sign carrying one word: Broadway.

  Later that year, I started going to Times Square from Brooklyn without an adult beside me, usually with Tom, the two of us standing like sea captains in the lead car of the subway train, plunging together into the eerie tunnels, racing under the streets and the East River, then emerging into the hard light of the stations, making the transfers to the IRT train, emerging at last in the tumult of Times Square. We were perfect targets for predators, naive and very young, but I never felt a sense of menace. The prevailing emotion was wonder. We’d gaze at the amazing blocklong signs rising ten stories above the crossroads of Broadway and Seventh as if they were structures imported from ancient Egypt or the hills of Rome. They were called “spectaculars,” and that’s what they were. We saw immediately that the Great White Way was more of a neon rainbow, the spectaculars never at rest, blinking, moving, changing color and shape with the speed of magic. We’d watch the sketch artists drawing sailors. We’d listen to barkers calling to the crowds. Right inside, folks, stuff ya never saw before, oney a quarter, come on and try it and . . . We’d look at the eight-by-ten glossies of the girls in the glass cases, girls who worked in the upstairs dance halls, their faces not as perfect as movie stars’, which made them seem even more dangerous in their bare-shouldered dresses. Sin was becoming the obscure object of our desires, or at least of mine. Once, we saw Willie Pep, the great featherweight champion, walking with a blond woman who was a head taller than Willie. He was my father’s favorite prizefighter, and we followed him uptown from the Paramount Building until he vanished into the Hotel Taft, the blond woman’s angular arm draped maternally across his shoulders. As good Catholic boys, we were disappointed that Willie was about to drop a decision to Satan here in the capital of sin, and we worried about his chances against Sandy Saddler. Years later, I interviewed Pep when his great days were over and told him the tale and asked if he had been disappointed too. He smiled like a witness before a grand jury and said he didn’t remember.

  Through my adolescence, Times Square kept calling. On summer nights in my teens, jazz lured me to West Fifty-second Street. This wasn’t precisely Times Square but was definitely one of its major tributaries, feeding into the square and pulling people from its vivid lights. The jazz clubs were almost all Mob joints, the owners too cheap to provide air conditioning, which meant that on humid nights in July and August, when the doors were o
pen to the hope of a summer breeze, I could just stand around on the sidewalks and listen. That’s how I first heard Dizzy Gillespie, Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, Carmen MacRae, and Lennie Tristano. Live. Outside one club, on a warm, drizzly night, a doorman, dressed in a royal blue coat adorned with gold braids, like someone from the court of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, said to me in a menacing New York accent, “Don’t lean on da cahs, kid.” To this day, every time I see a doorman, I think of that man in his glittery uniform. I’ve never again leaned on a parked car.

  Later, when I was home on leave from the navy, the same impulse toward jazz put me into Birdland, where Miles often played, and Dizzy and Max Roach. A tiny man named Pee Wee Marquette was the MC. If a musician did not tip him properly, his introduction would tail off before the mention of the player’s name. “Ladies and gentlemen, Birdland is proud to present the great mummadamummada mum . . .” The club was named, of course, for Charlie Parker, who opened it in December 1949, when every jazz buff knew him as Bird. At first (or so the story goes), there were a number of caged parakeets on the premises, but they all died within a few months from the cigarette smoke. Dizzy Gillespie once told me he thought they died because they didn’t tip Pee Wee Marquette. Bird played Birdland for the last time on March 4, 1955, and eight days later he was dead. The club lived on until 1965, but it had already played a part in the story of the New York alloy.

  Down the block from Birdland was the Palladium, where the greatest Latin bands all played: Machito and His Afro-Cubans, Tito Puente, Tito Rodriguez. Mambo, pachanga, rumba, charanga, cha-cha: All threw Caribbean heat into the New York night. The subway carried men and women here from Spanish Harlem and the Puerto Rican enclaves in the South Bronx and from the streets along the Brooklyn waterfront. Many first saw the astonishments of Times Square while heading for the Palladium.

  The old dance hall was up a flight of stairs, and I arrived one night to see the singer Alan Dale tumbling head over heels down the stairs. I noticed that he was wearing what were then called elevator heels. He pulled himself up, holding on to a railing like a drowning man who’d found the edge of a lifeboat, wiped at a bloody nose with a paper napkin, and walked on wobbling legs into the night. I never saw him again. I have no way of knowing what sin Alan Dale had committed, but the bouncers looked down at him as he disappeared with looks that said, We have done our duty. Then they turned and stepped into the Palladium. I went up the stairs after them.

  The Palladium and its bands drew the most amazing dancers in the city, better (to my taste) than any of the professionals in the Broadway theaters, far better than the Rockettes, who were thought of as an act for midwestern tourists. In memory, all the women at the Palladium had golden skin, white teeth, amazing hips, narrow waists, and bosoms encased in black silky dresses with straps as thin as the straps of slips. They wore three- and four-inch high heels, with which they hammered the hardwood floors while never losing the beat. Their skin glistened with a fine spray of perspiration. They gave off the aroma of gardenias. I’m sure these images are the result of some youthful defect in my vision. Hormone overload can distort the objects of anyone’s scrutiny. But in truth I don’t remember any women at the Palladium who were not beautiful. As for the men, I don’t remember them at all.

  I do remember Dizzy Gillespie walking into the Palladium one night, carrying his horn, goateed and smiling. He was appearing that night at Birdland and was obviously on a break. He nodded at many of the beautiful women, smiling in a devilish way, and made his way to the bandstand, where Machito awaited him, beaming. After a few minutes, Dizzy began to play, the bell of his trumpet aimed at the ceiling, the roof, the unseen New York sky. The Latin musicians played with ferocious precision, embracing the great musician from that other world right up the block. Together, for a few long minutes, they drove loneliness and anguish out of the night. Together they were making something new, welding New York to Havana and San Juan and Ponce, downtown to uptown, America to all the outposts of Africa. When I listen now to the recordings that Dizzy later made with Machito, I’m always thrown back to that thrilling night, and I wonder what happened to all the high-heeled women, who are grandmothers now, and most certainly still beautiful.

  In late 1955 I was working in the art department of a small advertising agency on Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. This street was the great midtown center of the diamond trade. I got to know some of the merchants, who tried in vain to explain the differences between Orthodox Jews and the Hasidim. They were patient with me, the curious goy, even though I never once had the money to purchase anything they offered for sale. At all hours of the day, even in rain and snow, the merchants would cluster on the street in small knots, examining some precious stone with a loupe, not trusting the artificial lights of the shops. Every month or so, there would be a moment of heart-stopping panic as some tiny gem slipped from the hands of a customer and fell through the subway ventilation grate to the muddy floor ten feet below. Then from some secret place would come a man with a long pole and a special flashlight, and they would peer into the darkness until the man with the pole—its tip gummy with some mysterious substance—found the stone. The men would exhale and, in at least one case I witnessed, cheer.

  Some had moved uptown from Canal Street and the Bowery, and a few older men remembered when the trade was practiced on Exchange Place, near Wall Street, before the rising skyscrapers made the street too dark for the examination of precious stones. There were men among them, too, who had survived the death camps of Europe, and on summer afternoons, you could see their bluish tattooed numbers. I tried in a muted, stumbling way to talk to such men about what had happened to them. Not one of them would say a thing. They would shrug, exhale, change the subject, working hard at being New Yorkers, residents of a city where self-pity was still one of the cardinal sins.

  In the middle of Forty-seventh Street there was a bookshop of uncommon excellence called the Gotham Book Mart. The store’s founder in 1920 was a woman named Frances Steloff, and she was still there when I started visiting, small, white-haired, with focused eyes behind her glasses. She was to New York what Sylvia Beach had been to Paris between the wars, a person who loved and celebrated literature, and did what she could to keep people reading works of talented unknowns and the century’s finest artists. Outside her store was a sign designed by John Held Jr., the man who during Prohibition made all those drawings for Life and Judge of flappers and Fitzgerald sophomores. The sign’s motto said, “Wise Men Fish Here.” And in its spirit, I often went fishing there. The rare books were beyond my bankroll, but there were little magazines for sale and inexpensive monographs on artists and obscure writers (obscure, that is, to me, but not to Frances Steloff). At the Gotham, I bought the first issue of the Paris Review and a few pamphlets by Beat poets like Ray Bremser and Jack Micheline that I hadn’t seen downtown on Eighth Street. But on the shelves of the Gotham I could also find out-of-print William Saroyan and James T. Farrell and, yes, Damon Runyon too. In the dusk of winter evenings, leaving the advertising agency or the Gotham while the diamond merchants shuttered their stores, I’d look to the west and see the glorious, garish lights of Times Square. They all seemed connected by more than simple geography.

  Then, for almost a year, I adopted a new routine. I’d leave the art department of that agency on Forty-seventh Street and hurry up Fifth Avenue to Forty-ninth Street, pushing through crowded streets at the end of the workday, and into the building in Rockefeller Center that housed the National Broadcasting Company. To save money for a year in Mexico, I was now working two jobs: the ad agency until five in the afternoon, and then NBC, where I worked as a page, a kind of glorified usher, until midnight. I worked on Sid Caesar’s show (“. . . next aisle on your right, ma’am, next aisle on your right . . .”); on a failed tryout of a quiz show for which Mike Wallace was to have been the MC; a fifteen-minute musical show starring Matt Dennis; and, the culmination of my long day’s journey into night, on The Tonight Show, starri
ng Steve Allen.

  Steve Allen, like so many others in those years, was helping to invent television. He was an okay piano player but not great. He was an okay songwriter but not great. And yet he had a loose, hip, relaxed style that was perfect for the emerging medium. He was what hipsters, and later Marshall McLuhan, called cool. He helped Skitch Henderson to create a fine band made up of solid studio musicians who were happy with the steady money and thankful that they did not have to play in saloons. He hired singers who later became stars: Steve Lawrence; Lawrence’s future wife, Eydie Gorme; Andy Williams. The show was one hour and forty-five minutes long, and it was live.

  The Tonight Show took place each night at the old Hudson Theater on the uptown side of West Forty-fourth Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues. The theater dates back to 1902, and Allen seemed delighted to be there, playing piano himself or watching other talented people from his desk. Sometimes, on steaming New York summer nights, he would open the back doors behind the stage and aim cameras into Forty-fifth Street. The inevitable New York characters would come by, peering into the brightness while Allen made wisecracks for the television audience. On any such night, you could see older women who sold flowers, dumb kids pulling faces, pretty young women in tight T-shirts, tourists with alarmed eyes. I’m sure the cops were watching too, looking for some dope who was wanted in four states. One night an immense hairy guy in a sleeveless undershirt came to the back door and stopped. Hair covered his chest and his arms and his back and bloomed from his ears and nose. He peered into the harsh lights, unable to see what was on the other side. He bared his teeth. He flared his amazing clogged nostrils. He scratched his hairy back. Allen called him King Kong, just arrived from the upper stories of the Empire State Building. The audience was laughing. The musicians were laughing. We pages were laughing. Everybody was laughing except the hairy guy. He never went away. He moved two feet left and stopped. He moved three feet right and stopped. And then finally the show had to end, and the music played, and the credits rolled. And somebody in the control room improvised a credit line that said “King Kong’s T-shirt by Hanes.”