by Henry Miller
“Nothing doing. You’re coming with me. I’m throwing a banquet tonight. Here, it’s right down this street. Are you coming?” shouted Moloch.
Randy seemed on the point of accepting, grew suddenly hesitant, and then stood stock still.
“Any women in the party?”
“No.”
“No women?”
“No, I told you.”
“So long, then!”
“So long!”
Neither turned to look back.
At eight-fifteen, punctual as a Twentieth Century Limited, Dion Moloch and his thirteen satisfied creditors were moving south and east in three Yellow taxis. Fourteen theater tickets, marked A2, A4, and so on, were stacked in his vest pocket like so many Sweet Caporal soubrettes which youngsters used to accumulate in the days when Admiral Dewey sailed into Manila Bay.
At St. Marks-on-the-Bouwerie the flotilla turns into the Judean Way. St. Marks, in its somnolescence, is turning a gentle tutti-frutti. Everywhere letters like music. Everywhere black snow, lousy wigs, unfurled beards.
Watch this window for slightly used bargains!
Cut rates
Slashed prices
Must vacate
Buy, buy, buy! Poverty walking about in fur coats; match vendors with fat jewels in the safe deposit vaults. Bankbooks hidden away in tattered trousers. Turkish Baths, Russian Baths, Sitz Baths, Public Baths. Baths, baths, baths—but no cleanliness.
Signs, placards, posters, electric light displays: the world made palatable, fashionable, lecherous, odoriferous. Dirty linen, adenoids, catarrh. An irruption of pimples, blackheads, warts, and wens.
A planet turned inside out, ransacked for trifles. A greasy vest, this Judean Way, over the fat belly of the metropolis.
Further along, movie houses, clinics, dance halls, tabernacles. The ghost of Jacob Gordin trudging through the blood-soaked tundras of Siberia. Natacha Rambova in a Laura Jean Libby anachronism. . . . Parisian Love with Clara Bow.
Still further along . . . “Bridgework, reasonable prices.” The Roumanian Rotisserie tickling the cold storage rump of Leo Tolstoy with the faint notes of a cymbalon. Renovated tenements converted into clean white facades glittering with pedagogical distinctions bulging with amorphous fur manufacturers and their bleating, dropsical consorts.
Messrs. Haunch, Paunch, and Jowl introducing Mme. Bertha Kalich in a morganatic marriage with the Second Avenue Chess Club. Frank Merrill in The Speed King . . . The Golden Cocoon ... Infatuation... the Church of All Nations with Russian letters over the door.
In pillars of fire, threatening every evening at seven o’clock to turn the Manhattan Business School into a conflagration:
THE NATIONAL WINTER GARDEN
From a joke to a national institution! A laugh-exploding burlesque in nine explosions. Burlesk: like it was in the good old days.
STOP!!!
Turn to Walter Pater’s Renaissance. The chapter on Botticelli.
“Besides those great men there is a certain number of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own, by which they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere. ...”
We will say no more about this conglomeration of bedlamites, this potpourri of pimps, pugs, and profanities, this melange of sybarites and cormorants. Not another word about acne, catarrh, eczema. Strike out the Kosher sign! These things are anathema to the polite American public. Besides, we are now in front of St. Augustine’s Church, trying to break into the long line of ticket buyers that stretches like the lower intestine from Second Avenue to the Bowery, and back again.
A big sign has been slapped under the illuminated cross: NO PARKING. But the wards of Houston Street have long ceased to believe in signs.
The lean Episcopal rector stands on the steps of St. Augustine’s Church and wonders if salvation is of the Jews. The church is as popular as an alderman without money.
The line moves like a corkscrew pushing into the neck of a bottle. Plenty of time to read the billboards; plenty of time to study Princess Lolo’s anatomical modulations. Always a good show at the National Winter Garden. Always a liberal array of photographs. Three Oriental dancers with a string of beads. Soubrettes with a bun on. Hal Rathbun and his bevy of Rosebuds. Dion Moloch and his flotilla of cock-eyed creditors. Everybody’s happy. “Ask Dad, he knows!”
An election rig rolls by with a calliope going full-blast. Seated on the front seat, in a convict’s uniform, is a life-size dummy. The words of a popular song float out.
“DURCH SCHIECHTE SCILAVERIM ZUM ELECTRIC CHAIR.”
Anglo-Saxons would call it “The Wages of Sin.”
The line breaks to admit the passage of the buxom prima donna, swathed in 124 rabbit skins. She treads with mincing steps in coy red-heeled pumps.
“Let did lady pass!”
In the lobby two freight elevators with trick doors pump the crowds up to the auditorium. The doors slide open as smoothly as nutmegs scraping over grated glass. Bohunks, sick with anticipation, are dumped out pell-mell. Uniformed attendants are on hand to grab, grab, grab. . . . They are as shy as Tammany Hall politicians.
Moloch is mistaken for a judge, and is obliged to give the usher a tip. He assembles his henchmen with the air of Napoleon returning from Elba. Like the Corsican, devoid of ambition, moving on through the power of destiny. The audience is taken in like so much gathered snot.
A seething inferno of smoke-smothered red lights is the orchestra pit. Standees three rows deep behind what should be Z, for zebra. The Minsky Brothers are dreaming in the box office of adding an extension next season. They dream this every night for ten months of the year.
Pathé News clicks monotonously. Winter sports in St. Moritz; Al Smith posing as a newsboy; Oberammergau players warming up for the Passion Play; the President’s wife in a set of new monkey furs; the Red Army, menace to the world, marching past the Kremlin; society belles giving Oedipus Rex for charity; blue ribbon chow dogs basking in superheated mansions; bathing beauties on floats, convinced that Atlantic City is a Mecca. . . .
Meanwhile the calcimined coloratura singer flings open the grimy window of her dressing room and gazes out over the rooftops and steeples extending limitless about her. Her brain is dizzy. She is debating whether to sing the Bird Song from Pagliacci or take the next train back to Allentown, Pa. New York is a filthy hole. Even the snow is dirty. And Signor Gatti-Casazza is a minotaur hidden in the adytum of a rose-scented labyrinth.
The tears of a burlesque prima donna are few, and not so expensive. Tears, expensive or inexpensive, are usually hidden by an asbestos curtain. And on the asbestos curtain, embroidered in letters of gold, is this epitaph:
“THE SHOW IS THE THING” —Shakespeare
Sad-eyed madonnas of avoirdupois, take a back seat! If ye must weep, weep where the Minsky Brothers cannot see. Shakespeare was right after all—“The show is the thing!” Afterwards . . . well, that’s another matter. Cut your throat, if you like.
Is this Purgatory, or are we dreaming? Bam, wham, slam, crang-bang! The curtain goes up on a jabberwocky chorus with beery voices and dirty necks. (The Rosebuds, previously mentioned!) Withered, mildewed roses of the dungheap. A barrelful of chipped pewter and cracked mugs. Shapes like corrugated ashcans. All wiggling away for dear life. Four bucks a day and a steady job. (The management requests, dear Rosebuds, that you kindly endeavor to keep the creases from those regions of the abdomen known as the epigastric, umbilical, and hypogastric.)
An 1888 peroxide blonde, suffering from adipose tissue, waggles a wicked hip: front view, side view, back view. Back view— immense! Juicy layers of fat sloshing about like floodtide in a ferry slip. . . . Ninth encore. She glues herself to the floor and, with the control of a yogi, slowly, deliberately, mercilessly sets in motion those portions of the human anatomy about which the less said the better. For the 669th time the orchestra leader refuses the proffered chunks of meat. Up front judges, bank clerks, pawnbrokers, pick and shovel men—all busy gulping down
oysters. . . .
More two-four flams from the traps and a ground bass of muffled roars like the stertorous last moments of a brontosaur. Thunderous applause licked up by the brass tongue of the orchestra.
Then, on with the dance! The joy is really unconfined, unformulated, unprognosticated. More hoochee koochee. Twenty-five song-and-dance installments to undress a pretty little Grand Street whore. Three-card monte. A medley of wisecracks. Ghost-walking done to uproarious mirth: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde à la Rube Goldberg. (No one suspects that Ben Ami is playing in English somewhere in the Tenderloin.)
Suddenly a brassy whang zam from the cymbals. A blanket of utter darkness, and then a cold blue spotlight accompanied by weird, exotic melodies from the woodwinds.
CLEO!!! DARLING OF THE GODS! OH MOMMER!
Izzy, the gallery god, downy with adolescence, gangrened with puberty, grips the cold iron rail with clammy hands. Izzy can’t take his hands off the blood-red rose that hangs from Cleo’s girdle. Someday she’s goin’ to lose that rose! Someday Izzy’s gonna be there when it happens.
She’s coming now, Cleo, from the wings. First an arm, snakelike and sinuous, followed by a leg from the Parthenon, and then her head, expressive as a turnip. Izzy’s eyes are fastened upon her velvet torso. It swells and heaves like a green ocean billow. Izzy’s forehead is a champagne bottle beaded with sweat.
Naked and sexed, Cleo moves like a wraith in a violet light, She is a hundred times more radiant, more vivid, than any dream. The air reeks with the perfume of her armpits. Izzy wants to screech. The molten fluid in his green body is choking him. He puts forth two scrawny arms. He embraces her. He takes her to him and crushes her, like a boa constrictor. The sinews of his muscles are twisted into a rag carpet. He groans with intoxication. His mouth is wide open, the tongue cemented to the roof. Every pore, every cell of his downy, gangrened body opens to receive the drench of ambrosial pollen. Music, flesh, incense: a kaleidoscope of undulating passions flash before him. Keep it up and Izzy will go cuckoo. This rot is too utterly utter. . . .
And all the while not a muscle of Cleo’s face moves.
Of an instant, like a discharge of virulent pus, comes a frenetic crescendo from the pit. All of Cleo, from her generous breasts to her gleaming thighs, blazes forth with spasmic violence. Even the mollusks in the audience tremble and gasp before this grand whoop-la that seizes the torso with paroxysmal fury, shakes the cobwebs out of it, and subsides with volcanic tremors.
As the lights flash Cleo flees, drawing her iron filings into the wings. The Rosebuds, nothing daunted by this exhibition, are out front, wiggling hard. A mad stampede to the latrines follows.
Moloch and his troupe bridge the intermission by standing on the fire escape and peering through the dressing-room windows. The shades are up, and the windows partially open. Some one yells: “There’s Cleo!” But it isn’t Cleo. “It’s some other bum.”
The discussions on the fire escape and in the latrines are similar in character to those that take place daily in brokers’ offices, barber shops, and political clubs. The important (!) female members of the cast are carefully sifted and graded, and then classified according to this or that . . . chiefly that.
After the intermission an illustrated song is thrown upon the screen. Everyone sings: “In Life’s December, When Love Is an Ember”. Under cover of darkness the ushers get busy with squirt guns. Now the entire edifice has the aroma of a urinal.
The curtain rises upon a solitary figure. It is the straight man, dressed in a shepherd’s plaid suit. He is grave and sedate. He brings a message from the management. In the pose of a poet about to hurl a prologue into the uterus of the beyond he battens his straw hat over his diaphragm with flexible, gem-strewn fingers. . . . “Next week, with the aid of our inimitable comedian, Hal Rathbun, we will put over a corking good skit entitled ‘Pussy Café.’ ”
Moloch, who has heard this wheeze at frequent intervals ever since the year 1905, is so far lost in ruminations that the remainder of the show becomes a complete blank.
He fumbles in his empty pockets. The wad is gone. According to the galumphs who stand up in the pulpit every Sunday and yawp about the hereafter his mind should be easy. He is free of debt. But he doesn’t feel easy. He feels sore. To liquidate one’s debt is not like throwing one’s sins overboard. ... He decides to walk out of the theater and leave the bunch flat. What the hell! He doesn’t owe them anything. . . .
Plunging at once into the stench of the East Side he gave himself up to reflections upon the white-haired matron of the rest room. Old age had given her a fallen womb. He wondered what her thoughts were as she sat in the rocker amid the odors of disinfectants and Woolworth perfumes. Were all women in the chorus diseased? He thought of Randy and his suet complex. A nice question ... “Do we all turn into suet?” There was a barrel of suet—yes, indeedy—in Hal Rathbun’s bevy of Rosebuds. Take all excess fat, roll it into a ball, and you’d have enough fat for frying purposes to last the ordinary housewife a year. How about human fat? Fancy now, a vat of grease, of human grease, always on tap for weddings, banquets, clambakes, and so forth. ... One of Hal Rathbun’s wisecracks perched on the front porch of his brain: “the sewer rat and I.” The expression carried no excess baggage with it. Imagine the Governor of South Carolina discussing his friend the governor of North Carolina and saying: “The sewer rat and I.” ... If one were to dally with such ideas the brain might go on a jamboree and land up in the psychopathic ward.
Threading his way toward the Delancy Street Bridge was like going on a rampage with the Jukes and Kallikaks. Washlines and fire escapes made symphonies only in the minds of poets and ultramodern painters. What a trite melodrama! Reginald Pierpoint Rockfeller, the villain, versus the Peepul of these United States, the meek and lowly, the disinherited, the homeless homers of the brave. To a physician the scene is apt to suggest a warfare between conflicting armies of microbes, with human bodies as battlefields and pestilence as high explosives. For him there is only one remedy: LYSOL.
Dion Moloch experienced a plethora of sensations. Foremost among them was an itching sensation such as is sometimes produced by lying naked on dry breadcrumbs.
Gordon Craig once took Ibsen’s Rosmersholm and gave it spiritual dimensions. Dion Moloch felt as though he had checked his soul at the National Winter Garden and was now delivering his bones to a charnel house. He tried to resurrect Cleo’s priapic devotions. No go. The streets swarmed with maggots, the air was alive with vermin. Here a nose was missing, there an eye stuck out like an abscess. Deformities pegged along, rheumy, bile-ridden, lopsided, and demented. He stepped aside to make way for an idiot. There was a look of agglutinated oatmeal on the face of this overgrown fetus. Moloch shuddered. “An ax!” he cried. “An ax!”
He came to the Williamsburg Bridge.
A blast of the sea air smote him on the cheek. He sucked the ozone into his system with great gasps. The bridge was deserted on the footpath. It looked gray and sanitary. It matched his thoughts. “In the morning,” he reflected aloud, “fetid tides of flesh will roll up and inundate this span; the beautiful steel girders will groan and creak with carrion, the entire edifice will crawl with human vermin, be drenched with garlic, sing with business.”
The old Fourteenth Ward was waiting to greet him on the other side of the bridge. Night and the stars had settled down on the old neighborhood, it was festooned with melancholy. In youth the homesite may be dilapidated and asthmatic, but never melancholy. His mind now was a whirlpool of recollections. Willy Maine danced a dervish for him. “Crazy Willy Maine.” A big shambling gawk with the brain of a tadpole, who used to crawl out on the shed of a Sunday morning, when the folks had gone to church, and exhibit himself in his undershirt. A thoroughly bestial exhibition which horrified the neighbors. “Bijork, bijork!” was the only utterance Crazy Willy Maine could articulate. There he would remain, on the shed overhanging the paint shop, carried away by his obscene divertissement, until his parents returned from chur
ch. The street gamins would shriek with hysterical glee. On the sly they fed this ape rotten bananas. Crazy Willy gobbled them up as if they were stuffed truffles. Later he would get an old-fashioned bellyache and scream at the top of his lungs: “Bijork! Bijork!”
Sunday mornings the old Fourteenth Ward usually opened up like a flower pot in Paine’s fireworks. By nine o’clock, at the corner of Driggs Avenue and North First Street, things began to happen. Willy Maine wasn’t the whole show. Silverstein, the tailor, generally crawled out of his scabby little shanty in his shirt sleeves, his suspenders flapping between his legs, and a pair of newly pressed pants slung over his arm to be delivered to Daly, the fishman. Johnny Paul, maybe, ducked into the saloon on the corner of Fillmore Place with a big glass pitcher hidden under the Sunday newspaper. When Johnny emerged he would wipe the foam off his lips—carefully, as if he were scooping gems into a casket. Soon Father O’Toole would come mincing along, a little bleary-eyed from Saturday night’s shindig. “Good morning, Mrs. Gorman,” says he, doffing his greasy lid. “Good morning, Father,” says Mrs. Gorman very respectfully. Her hubby’s drawers are hanging on the line in the backyard. “It’s a sin to go to mass without drawers,” yells the uxorious Mr. Gorman from the folding bed. “Sure, and it’s a greater sin to lie abed on Sunday morning,” shouts Mrs. Gorman, flopping about in her bed slippers and disturbing the neighborhood with her County Cork jabber.
By ten o’clock the ward heelers are out in full regalia, and William Jennings Bryan is sure to be the next President. Mike Pirosso is up on the roof, shooing his pigeons away with a piece of bunting stuck on the end of a long swaying pole. If he didn’t have his pigeons to look after he’d go nuts tending the fruit stand all day and night.... In the old days a man could get along with just pigeons for relaxation. A man didn’t have to go to the movies or break his neck getting nowhere in a tin buggy. Shucks! What if he did rush the growler a few times on Sunday? It made him feel good. It made him a public-spirited citizen, a man capable of voting the Democratic ticket.