by Tom Wolfe
The Dixie cup is the conventional container. There is one young Negro on the Seventh Avenue line who used to get on at 42nd Street and start singing a song, “I Wish That I Were Married.” He was young and looked perfectly healthy. But he would get on and sing this song, “I Wish That I Were Married,” at the top of his lungs and then pull a Dixie cup out from under the windbreaker he always wore and walk up and down the car waiting for contributions. I never saw him get a cent. Lately, however, life has improved for him because he has begun to understand status competition. Now he gets on and sings “I Wish That I Were Married,” only when he opens up his windbreaker, he not only takes out a Dixie cup but reveals a cardboard sign, on which is written: “MY MOTHER HAS MULTIPLE SCHLERROSSIS AND I AM BLIND IN ONE EYE.” His best touch is sclerosis, which he has added every conceivable consonant to, creating a good, intimidating German physiology-textbook solidity. So today he does much better. He seems to make a living. He is no idler, lollygagger or bum. He can look with condescension upon the states to which men fall.
On the East Side IRT subway line, for example, at 86th Street, the train stops and everyone comes squeezing out of the cars in clots and there on a bench in the gray-green gloom, under the girders and 1905 tiles, is an old man slouched back fast asleep, wearing a cotton windbreaker with the sleeves pulled off. That is all he is wearing. His skin is the color of congealed Wheatena laced with pocket lint. His legs are crossed in a gentlemanly fashion and his kindly juice-head face is slopped over on the back of the bench. Apparently, other winos, who are notorious thieves among one another, had stripped him of all his clothes except his windbreaker, which they had tried to pull off him, but only managed to rip the sleeves off, and left him there passed out on the bench and naked, but in a gentlemanly posture. Everyone stares at him briefly, at his congealed Wheatena-and-lint carcass, but no one breaks stride; and who knows how long it will be before finally two policemen have to come in and hold their breath and scrape him up out of the gloom and into the bosom of the law, from which he will emerge with a set of green fatigues, at least, and an honorable seat at night on the subway bench.
The unfortunate thing is that a nekkid old wino on a subway bench is not even a colorful sight, or magical. It is something worth missing altogether, and in fact much of the status symbolism of New York grows out of the ways the rich and the striving manage to insulate themselves, physically, from the lower depths. They live up high to escape the dirt and the noise. They live on the corners to get the air. And on Monday nights they go to the Metropolitan Opera in limousines.
Up to the Broadway and the 39th Street entrances roll the limousines and out debouch the linked and the lacquered, as Wallace Stevens used to say, and then, as no one ever notices, the limousines pull off. The chauffeurs have to go somewhere, after all, while their people, as they call them, go settling down, like animated Lalique, into the Parterre Boxes and the Dress Circle, for two, three, even four hours of opera. So the chauffeurs have developed an opera-night social life of their own. They drive across 39th Street, over to Eighth Avenue, and then turn back up 40th, between Eighth and Seventh. There may be as many as fifty limousines heading for the block. There is a mounted policeman with nothing to do but wait for them. At 7:30 he raises his right hand as the signal, and the chauffeurs can start lining up on either side. In a few minutes the neon signs of the London Tavern, a set-’em-up and hook-’em-down saloon near the corner, are flooding in splendid orange pools on the grilles, hoods, and Art Nouveau radiator caps of Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs, and the lineup of limousines begins to stretch all the way to Eighth Avenue.
The chauffeurs, after all, come to the opera as often as their employers, and so it is a social thing for them, too. By 8 P.M. in their black coats, black ties, black visored caps, they are already standing around in groups on the sidewalk, and by 8:30 the first groups head for Bickford’s Cafeteria. Someone has to stay behind to watch the automobiles. They end up tooling in and out of Bickford’s in shifts. They sit down at the Formica tops and drink coffee and talk about opera, among other things.
“Germans!” Leland, who drives for Mrs. ———, tells me. “Richard Strauss. They won’t let out until 11:45.”
“Strauss isn’t so bad,” says a friend of Leland’s, a very old and apoplectic-looking chauffeur who doesn’t shave very well.
“It’s only Der Rosenkavalier,” Frank, Mr. P———’s man, tells me. “The rest of the time”—he shrugs—“Strauss is O.K. Wagner is the holy terror.”
“You’re not kidding now.”
“Wagner!”
“Give me the Italians,” Leland says.
“Puccini!”
“Right!”
“Tosca.”
“Tosca?” I say.
“Yes,” says Leland. “Tosca lets out about 10:30.”
“I’ve been to Tosca when it lasted to 11:15,” says a younger chauffeur, an earnest man with a great head of straight black hair, but no one pays any attention to him. He drives Carey Cadillacs, rented by opera-goers who do not have limousines of their own.
“The Italians I can live with,” Leland announces, and they all nod over the heavy-duty ochre chinaware and the Formica tops.
Jason Robards, Tuesday Weld, the ménage à trois, celebrity-style—and now chauffeurs who sit in Bickford’s Cafeteria discussing opera and cutting the Carey crowd. All that New York needs is simpler people.
Hugh Troy eased the situation a little. Hugh Troy, the artist and children’s book author, got one of the cab drivers who has an exposition to make.
“It’s a hot day for the middle of February!” says the cab driver.
“Yes, it is,” Hugh Troy says.
“You know,” the cab driver says, “they say the earth’s skin is slipping, and right now New York is right over where Savannah, Georgia, used to be. The whole skin is slipping.”
Hugh Troy thinks that over a second and says, “It must be getting very baggy.”
“Baggy?” says the cab driver.
“You know—baggy down around the South Pole.”
The cab driver thinks that over a while and never does go on with his exposition of how the earth’s skin is slipping.
“Baggy,” Hugh Troy says to himself, “down around the South Pole.”
Well, Hugh Troy has taken one big leaguer out of the action—but there are so many millions to go.
Acknowledgments
The following chapters were first published in Esquire Magazine: “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!!,” “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” (under the title, “There Goes [Varoom! Varoom!] That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”), “The Marvelous Mouth,” “The Last American Hero” (under the title, “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!”), and “Purveyor of the Public Life” (under the title, “Public Lives: Confidential Magazine; Reflection in Tranquility by the Former Owner, Robert Harrison”); “The New Art Gallery Society” first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar; all the other essays first appeared in the New York Herald Tribune’s Sunday magazine, New York. “The Big League Complex” is reprinted from the book, New York, New York, © 1964 by the New York Herald Tribune, with the permission of the publishers, The Dial Press, Inc.
The drawings for “Teen-age Male Hairdos” first appeared in the Springfield (Mass.) Sunday Republican, those for “New York’s Beautiful People” first appeared in Venture Magazine, and the other drawings first appeared in the New York Herald Tribune’s New York.
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Copyright © Thomas K Wolfe, Jr 1963, 1964, 1965
Copyright © New York Herald, Inc. 1963, 1964, 1965
Tom Wolfe has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in Great Britain in 1966 by Jonathan Cape
This edition reissued in 2018 by Vintage Classics
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
