O, Africa!

by Andrew Lewis Conn

  A finger points across the sky. FOLLOW THE CROWD TO NATHAN’S instructs the red-and-yellow billboard. Observing the imperative, the gang goes forth, with each step growing in number: fans, onlookers, hangers-on, autograph hounds, and the celebrity-mad filling in chinks between crew members.

  “You’re not Babe Ruth,” protests a youngster perhaps five or six years old, tugging at the great man’s sleeve.

  “What gave it away, kid?”

  “Where’s your bat?”

  “Good point.” Tousling the boy’s hair.

  Leading the parade, marching through walls of customers that extend from hot-dog grilling stations all the way to the curb, Micah feels light, buoyant, made of seafoam stuff. As the company converges on the corner of Surf and Stillwell avenues—greeted with handshakes from the formally dressed, fantastically named Nathan Handwerker himself—the crowd continues to multiply through its own tumbling force. Kids in swimming trunks lean over the sides of the boardwalk to get a better look, parents hold their children out of hotel- and tenement-room windows, faces jerk from opened car doors, everyone desperate for a glimpse of their heroes. As word makes its way through the park and onto the beach that the ballplayer and the movie star are here, umbrellas are folded up, mothers and fathers begin clearing from the water, and an audible, uniform wave rises out of the surf. From the tops of roller coasters—CYCLONE in ten-foot-high letters ringed with electric lights—centipede arms wave in unison cheers: “The Babe is here! Bambino is at Nathan’s!”

  “Anything you like, gentlemen,” says Handwerker, whose very person is as long and lean as one of his sausages—an Old World tradition transformed by speed and packaging into American amusement. “It is our pleasure.”

  “Thanks,” Micah answers, announcing himself as the man in charge while the crew plops equipment crates down around them, a Bedouin tribe settling in for the night. “We’ll have two for me, two for Mr. Ruth, a couple dozen for the rest of the crew, and lemonades all around.”

  “Just two?” asks Ruth.

  “Why?” Micah says, sensing a dare. “How many d’you normally eat?”

  “Well, I only get around here once every couple of years or so now.” Screwing his brow to avoid the apricot glare, turning his features even more iconic. “But when I do, I generally eat ten, twelve at a go.”

  “Garçon!” Micah snaps, stepping past Handwerker and laying his palms on the counter. “We’ll have six dozen red hots, billed to Imperial Pictures. That’s I-M-P …”

  The parameters of the contest are established in no time. After debating the merits of speed versus quantity, it’s settled: Whoever can eat the most hot dogs in fifteen minutes will be declared the winner. If Babe eats the most, the ballplayer will leave the day’s shoot with a pair of Till’s famous horn-rims. If Micah, masticating for the home team, proves victorious, the company will be presented with the bat with which Babe had hit his record-setting sixtieth homer the season before. Till, a vegetarian, takes the role of officiator, keeping time with a pocketwatch lifted from the pages of Alice in Wonderland.

  “You know how hot dogs were invented, right?” Micah asks Ruth as they await the stacks of food.

  “No, tell me,” says Babe, loosening his trouser belt a few notches as Handwerker approaches with two trays loaded with crackling weenies the approximate length and color of dynamite sticks.

  “Well, the Earl of Frankfurter was an inveterate gambler, you see. And one night at the betting tables, he began getting hungry …”

  “Listen to this wise-apple.” Ruth grins. “Say, how’d a fella like you get into the picture business anyway?”

  “It was the biggest whorehouse I could find.”

  “Stick with me, kid, I’ll show you some others.”

  “Gentlemen,” Till intones in a voice as flat as the midwest prairie, “on your marks … Get set … Go!”

  A massacre ensues. At the two-minute mark, Babe is onto his sixth hot dog while Micah is still negotiating his third. At the eight-minute mark, the ballplayer, looking pink and pampered as a newborn, is chomping on his eighteenth while the director, after scouring the heavens for signs of Providence, returns his gaze to his sixth wiener.

  Through it all, Micah times his gastric eruptions so the cataclysms are drowned out by the roar that goes up whenever Babe finishes another dog. Ruth, who belches magnificently and farts at will, displays no such sense of decorum.

  “Pass me another,” Ruth says, hot-dog ends bulging out of squeezed fists.

  “Get your own,” gasps Micah, who busies himself arranging log-cabin style the two dozen dogs left on his eating stand. Then, gagging to the officiator, “We eat bun, too?”

  “If it’s to be any kind of contest,” answers Till, “I’d say so, yes.”

  “Twenty, Babe, twenty! You can do it!” cries a cat-eyed boy. Ruth acknowledges the waif’s encouragement with simultaneous triumphal blasts, douses his indigestion with waves of lemonade, then rounds the bases: twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four.

  “And … time!” announces Till, delivering Micah from greater gastric doom and declaring Babe Ruth the world’s first hot-dog-eating-competition champion.

  “You’re still eating?” Izzy asks his brother after penetrating the crowd to find Micah staring longingly at his tenth dog.

  “I’m still hungry,” Micah protests, wiping at a swath of mustard with his tie and letting loose a silent fart his brother instantly recognizes for its fried-liver-and-onion smell.

  “Good God, Micah,” Izzy says, marveling at the crop circle of crumbs and napkins and sudsy cups ringing the contestants’ feet. “How do you do it?”

  “Courage.” Micah hiccups. “An interesting concept, one worth investigating.” At a quarter to five, the sun has just begun its sink. A lemon drop, a lollipop, it dissolves over everything within reach on its long descent: the cross-weave of elevated trains, the ragtag collection of rides and carnival attractions crowned by the park’s giant windup toy, then the boardwalk, the beach, the surf.… In the distance a familiar twinkling tune:

  Meet me tonight in Dreamland,

  Under the silvery moon.

  Meet me tonight in Dreamland,

  Where love’s sweet roses bloom.

  “So listen,” Micah says through a stuffed mouth, sending spitballs of meat and bread flying toward his brother. “The big man’s here.”

  “It’s amazing we got him,” Izzy answers, referring to the ballplayer. “He’s a natural, too.”

  “No, not Ruth. I mean Marblestone,” Micah says, referring to Arthur Marblestone, the 350-pound founder and president of Imperial Pictures, who—equal parts Falstaff and Shylock—presided over a motley empire of nickelodeons, camera crews, gag men, actors, and bit players.

  “He’s here? Where?” Izzy asks, a band of perspiration pinpricking his hairline. “The Wonder Wheel,” Micah says, pointing heavenward. “His Eminence has been surveying the action from on high all day. Miss Belletti called long-distance the other night. He’s concerned about overages, wants to make sure the production’s on track. I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “You make a career out of worrying me.”

  “Look, listen, if it didn’t sound so ominous, I’d say I’m needed uptown immediately after things wind down here,” Micah rambles, reflecting upon the fact that clever liars give details but the cleverest do not.

  “Micah, please don’t ask what you’re going to ask me.”

  “You know the shyster can’t stand me anyway.” Putting an arm around his brother’s shoulders and imperceptibly steering the pair of them in the direction of the park’s giant aerial carousel. “Go. Talk to him. Tell him how well things are going. Here, bring him this.” Placing a half-eaten, vaguely wet hot dog in his brother’s hand. “A peace pipe!”

  Whenever Micah found himself on a roll during a shoot—the chemistry of the participants locking into place like covalently bonded molecules—or received a compliment, or came into possession of a good hand
after a run of bum luck at the poker table, his biological response was always the same. He immediately had to urinate. So, after thanking Ruth, accepting a pair of complimentary Yankee tickets, and exchanging his telephone number for that of the ballplayer’s private suite at the Ansonia Hotel, Micah goes trolling around the park looking for a place to take a leak.

  Heat and sunshine hopping on his face, Micah takes in the passing parade of women with parasols and men in derbies, brownies, and bowler hats; brilliantined barkers and sailors on shore leave; cigarette girls and cotton-candy kids; the entire ready-made collage of movement, light, and faces. Near the Tumble Bug, a young colored boy of perhaps ten or twelve has set up a shoeshine operation. Dressed in filthy overalls, the youth looks to be enjoying himself plenty, after finishing each shine spinning around on one knee atop a piece of corrugated cardboard, bringing himself to a halt, snapping his little rag at the client’s dress shoes, and, with an outstretched palm, giving his sales pitch:

  Just twenty cents a shine,

  Come rain or come shine.

  Not a quarter, nickel, or dime,

  Just twenty cents a shine!

  Marveling at the perfection of his features—the bright eyes set in an ovoid face, the lean, agile frame and black wool padded tight—Micah thinks the boy must be a symbol of something, but what? Then he checks himself. People aren’t abstractions, unless they’re celebrities like Ruth or Till. Better to simply admire the smiling ten-year-old’s performance and appreciate the boy for choosing a profession that allows him to spit on his employers (!), Micah thinks as he watches him work up a gob of saliva for his next customer.

  Micah held the belief that it wasn’t eyes that were windows onto the soul but a man’s hardworking shoes. In which case, what this boy must have seen! Micah and his brother hadn’t been allowed to go to the pictures until they were ten, weren’t allowed to visit Coney Island until their haftarah studies were safely behind them, yet look at this kid, already selling, hustling, sizing people up, alert as a crow. Wonder what it’s like for him waking up and looking in the mirror. All that black. Black hair, black eyes, in a black face. Wonder what he makes of things. Wonder if he’ll be shining shoes ten years from now. Twenty? Smiling, the boy spits on another customer’s shoes.

  Micah thought about black people a lot. How they lived in secret, out in the open. How they were pulling and shaping the country, creating an entire shadow culture like an undertow sculpting the shoreline. How each encounter with a colored person almost always marked a silent occasion of curiosity, bafflement, and shame. But these feelings were only inklings, campfire embers. Micah didn’t have the language, the politics, or the will to explore them. And, professionally, he had indulged in the worst of it, too, shooting a two-reeler a couple of years before called Scaredy Spooks, a fright comedy with blacked-up actors, tar-faced servants, knee-clattering darkies, and a chorus of slow-moving pickaninnies. Micah had been forbidden from using colored actors, instead casting tall, aquiline-nosed Avery Parkinson in the role of the head butler, his face all but immobilized under a half inch of greasepaint and burned cork.

  “For what?” roared Marblestone when the filmmaker insisted on employing performers from the Chitlin’ Circuit for their next picture. “To play the busboy? Let me call Paul Robeson, see if he’s available.”

  “Look, Arthur, I’m not trying to cause a stir. I’m just looking after the integrity of the thing,” Micah shot back. “Every time the audience see someone in blackface, it throws them out of the picture. Now, there’s a very talented actor named Dooley I’d like you to see.…”

  Loath as Micah was to admit it, Marblestone had a point: The very sight of coloreds on-screen was a cue for guffaws, a black performer’s very presence in a picture meant to be taken as the negation of the hero. Micah did not see things this way. Colored people exerted a fascination over him. Their faces looked more interesting than others, better keepers of secrets, wizened and wizardly, all-seeing and ancient-seeming. Even kids’ faces. Like this shoeshine boy. Could be ten. Or forty.

  As a moviemaker who enjoyed some notoriety, Micah had been privy to various universes, and New York’s shadow city was one of them: unforgettable nights spent exploring Jungle Alley—the string of clubs and speakeasies running along 133rd Street between Lenox Avenue and Seventh—hours lost in private poker dens past Columbia University’s verdant campus, where, across green felt, he’d been introduced to Mr. Waldo, a man whose totemic silences would have reduced Marblestone to a puddle.

  That first night of card playing, Micah had witnessed Mr. Waldo, sitting in a shimmering red suit, relieve a man of his ring finger by way of a cigar cutter after he’d caught him cheating. Later that same night, Micah learned that Mr. Waldo had taken in three orphan boys as his own and marveled as, at just after 2:00 A.M., his proud host introduced the youngest of the bunch, hectoring him for receiving a C on a spelling test. “How you gonna be a person in the world,” asked Mr. Waldo’s creased and pitted face, sending the offending exam around the table for all to inspect, “if you can’t spell ‘intolerance’?”

  There is wonder there, Micah thinks as he leaves the shoeshine boy to go about his business—spinning, laughing, snapping, happy—and moves from the brightness of one of Luna Park’s promenades to the shadows of a back alley. As he strays farther from the safety of the crew, some primitive ticking in Micah’s reptile brain, some atavistic pulsing on his skin, signal him that he is being followed. Keeping one hand in his jacket pocket fastened around an exposure meter the approximate weight and size of a pistol, Micah feels his heart skip like a flat stone across the surface of a pond. Creditors, bookies, bootleggers, mistresses, sharks, sharpies—he owed lots of things to lots of people. How tragic, how comic, how appropriate to be discovered dead in the gutter with his putz in his hand.

  Turning around, Micah breathes a sigh of relief. If there is a gun to be used in this scene, it’s a water pistol, which she fires from her hip on cue, hitting him with marksmanlike skill just above his navel. Rose Letty is so light-skinned that Micah hadn’t known she was colored when he first spotted her in Imperial’s New York office. All he had known about her at the time was that she was the most exotically pretty and self-possessed of the women in the costume department. There was a regal quality to her remoteness, an aristocratic dignity in her inability to mask disdain. While the other girls went out to lunch together or gabbed about weekend plans or pored over the latest issue of Movie Star News, Rose inhabited a kind of pyramidal silence. There was something Cleopatra-like about the girl with the thicket of dark hair piled high atop her head like forestry gracing a mountain peak, the bee-stung lacquered lips and unblinking, kohl-eyed stare.

  Better, her sense of mystery was deepened, then redeemed, by her laugh: a great big gong of a thing trailed by ice-cream-truck giggles. Micah had first heard it, had first been treated to it, had first been sucker-punched and knocked flat by it one day when Marblestone’s secretary was unable to make the trip east and Rose had been assigned to attend to the men in the projection room. She entered with a tray of refreshments just as the dailies reached the climax from Hopping Mad!, a seven-reeler about a city boy who inherits a farm overrun by rabbits. Till was on-screen battling a bunny puppet wielding a blazing ember when up in flames went the comic’s suit, out of Rose burst a balloon of laughter, and down went the tray of milk and sugar and saucers.

  “Who’s that?” Micah asked after she’d done clearing away the mess.

  “Rose,” Izzy answered through a deflated éclair, marking his brother’s avidity. “Works in the costume department.”

  “Make sure she attends the dailies from now on, will you?”

  Micah had a wife and two young boys—Margaret, Benjamin, and David—comfortably installed in a stately Fifth Avenue apartment filled with all the modern conveniences, decorative tchotchkes, framed photographs, and every other outward sign of familial solidity and content. The residence served as a kind of domestic North Star from which Mic
ah could set a moral compass that had long since been blown leagues off course. He had become so inveterate a liar that he would grow offended when caught in the flawed stitching of one of his own mistruths, the deceptions, fabrications, and half-truths having become the very warp and woof that held the marriage together.

  “Yes, I’ve been known to shoot a few larks in my time, but it’s a hobby,” he explained to Izzy—poor, pitiable, virginal Izzy—after his brother had spotted him ensconced with a starlet in a corner booth at the Brown Derby, arms buried in thigh beneath the table. “I encourage my wife’s hobbies—needlepoint, badminton, the monitoring of Ben’s chronic diarrhea—and hope she would encourage mine. Margaret knew when she married me I’m a man whose eyes have a lot of lashes. So yes, I’ve split a few rails in my day, I’ve snapped a few twigs. But it’s harmless, Itz. Harmless!

  “Besides, everyone knows the movies are all about sex. In very real ways, we owe our professional livelihood to the continued investigation of my hobby.”

  It wasn’t the animal act itself that excited him so much as the relational shift it rendered, its planar rearrangement of perspective. The electron leap from the world of propriety to the world of sex as dramatic as the moment when a radio, sitting fat and lonely atop a mantel, is turned on, a fully animating presence flowering the room with voices and music. Off to on. Potential to kinetic. Need met by answer. Rising. Sinking. A physical exertion not unlike swimming. Swimming into a person. So she had come to him later that afternoon in the back of the screening room on West Forty-Seventh Street, with her dark mouth and thick hair and saddle of freckles across her nose, something tensile and resistant about her that excited Micah more than the willing, frothy pliancy of the other girls he’d bedded.

  Slowly, Micah unbuttons his trouser fly and flaps the organ out. In the benday light of the alleyway, it looks pitiable, as pink and vulnerable as a hatchling, forever questioning him with its dumb, open mouth. The entire thing was a ridiculous proposition: the comic implement men carry between their legs, the placement of these rubbery few inches, holding the possibility of ruin. To Rose, Micah’s manhood resembled a deflated balloon, a sad-looking thing one finds discarded on a table at a child’s birthday party.