The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  NIK COHN

  The Heart of the World

  With an Afterword by the Author

  Contents

  One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Interval

  Two Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Interval

  Three Chapter 18

  Coda

  Acknowledgments

  Afterword

  Sources

  About the Author

  Nik Cohn was brought up in Derry, Northern Ireland. His books include Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, I Am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo, Ball the Wall, The Heart of the World and Need. He also wrote the story that gave rise to Saturday Night Fever and collaborated on Rock Dreams with the artist Guy Peellaert. He lives in New York.

  ALSO BY NIK COHN

  Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom

  I Am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo

  Market

  Today There are No Gentlemen

  Arfur

  King Death

  Rock Dreams (with Guy Peellaert)

  Ball the Wall: Nik Cohn in the Age of Rock

  Need

  God Given Months

  Yes We Have No: Adventures in the Other England

  Twentieth Century Dreams (with Guy Peellaert)

  Soljas

  Triksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap

  This book is the partial record of a walk I made up Broadway, starting at the Battery and aiming for the Bronx. Originally, I had planned a voyage round the world, but my friend Jon Bradshaw talked me out of it, turned my face to the Great White Way. ‘It is the world within itself,’ he said. So I started walking. Then Bradshaw died. But I kept on walking still, his spirit crouched on my shoulder.

  One

  1

  At the corner of Broadway and Canal, a sheet of stray paper snagged my trouser leg and would not let go. On it I read a life history, neatly typed in single spacing: ‘Well this is the story of a young girl by the name of Carmen Venus Colon, shes 8 years old, very pretty living with her mother her name is Felicidad, brother his name is Hector, and mother’s boyfriend Charlie.

  ‘This is the year of 1981, this young girl is very trouble. This is a real life story, this is very emotional, this may have been your own life story, but this is an ordeal for a young girl that wants to be the best that she can be, but she had to go through all the obsticles that got in her way.

  ‘So please enjoy the book.’

  It was early January. The morning was bright but bitter cold, far too cold to stand reading life stories on Broadway street corners. So I tucked the page into my overcoat pocket, took shelter inside the Plum Blossom, and called for duck soup.

  While I waited, I locked myself in the bathroom and took out Carmen’s story, spread it flat across my knees. ‘This all started in the Bronx, NY. Well I guess I use to be a good student but after I was seperated from my big brother Hector I was always in my own little world. Well I guess you can always say every kid was in their own little world but I was different, I was the real weird one. I loved my mother alot and also her boyfriend Charlie, the best friend and boyfriend in the world, but I was constantly beat on. I didn’t know what I did wrong, it seemed to make no differents. Then by the age of 9 also I was sex molested by Charlie. This really had me in the dumps. But after awhile I got use to it. I mean love comes in all shapes and sizes, you just take it as it comes.’

  There the manuscript ended.

  When I came out into the restaurant again, my soup was waiting on the table but some other man was drinking it, and this man was Sasha Zim.

  Alexei Alexandrovich had sent him. If I meant to walk all the way up Broadway and live to tell the tale, he’d said, I would need a guide and minder, and Sasha Zim was the very man. He drove a Checker cab by day, played drums at night, and he was in love with streets, all streets, but Broadway above all streets. ‘So where do I find him?’ I’d asked.

  ‘In my bath. With his drums,’ said Alexei. ‘They’ve been sleeping there for weeks.’

  Neck-deep in my soup, he looked about twenty, a loose-limbed and gangling sort, big-boned and reddish blond, with a tangled mop of hair spilling out from under a cheese-cutter cap. ‘I am sorry abusing your duck but I am tired, very starving,’ he said. ‘In my taxi, crazyman goes crazy, declaims he is Trebitsch Lincoln, Abbot of Shanghai, master spy, second coming of John Baptist, and I have to take him to Turkish bath, steam away sins for all mankind. Oh, brudder. Turkish bath is closing during AIDS, so now I have to take him to bar, drink away sins for all mankind. Bar he is in Passaic, New Jersey.’ He wiped his lips; he shook himself. ‘So when do we Broadway?’ he asked.

  ‘Any time you’re ready.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sasha Zim, ‘how good is this duck soup.’

  High on his right cheekbone was a small strawberry birthmark shaped like a tattooed scimitar. In repose, it was so faint, it might have been just a bruise. But as the heat of the soup rolled through him and his blood rose, so did the mark. Now it glowed like a flaming brand: ‘Broadway,’ he intoned, reciting by rote, ‘is mother of Broadways all over world, mother of lights of Piccadilly Circus and of Place Pigalle and Teatralny Ploschtchad. Great White Way is greatest white way.’

  ‘Been here long?’

  ‘Six years, ten months.’

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘Moscow. Novokuznetskaya,’ Sasha said, as if that explained everything. ‘Till then I was seventeen, and now I have twenty-four.’

  I ordered duck soup of my own, and for some minutes the two of us wallowed in silence. Each bowl was half a basinful of fatted broth, piled high with bones and noodles, so that all day afterward a film of grease would coat our mouths like spikenard, a magical saline solution, strong to ward off evils. ‘So you’re staying with Alexei Alexandrovich?’ I mumbled.

  ‘Is my drums,’ Sasha said. ‘Zim, he can be sleeping in taxi, in street, with woman, with woman in taxi, with woman in taxi in street, forgeddaboudit. But drums need get their rest.’

  God’s Mutt, Alexei Alexandrovich had called him. In bomber jacket and Hawaiian shirt, jogging pants, lumberjack boots, a buffalo-head Western belt and a small silver crucifix, he was a walking flea market. Yet his face looked brand new, never used. ‘What it is,’ he explained. ‘I’m Soverican.’

  He had first learned English from daytime TV, General Hospital and As the World Turns and The Young and the Restless, Hawaii 5–0 and Fantasy Island, washing-powder and papertowel commercials, reruns of I Love Lucy. Now he worked days, but his education continued. ‘Am picking off street, like scavenger,’ he said. ‘In taxi is university of all mankinds, what you don’t know won’t hurt you, what you do is killing you dead.’

  The Plum Blossom was safe harbor. Once it had been Dave’s Corner, famous for its egg creams. Then it was crammed with punks easing their cocaine nerves; now it catered to taxi drivers and juries, also a few Chinese. Ranks of Peking ducks, gleaming purple and umber, filled the plate-glass windows. Within was a room full of Formica tables, penned in by blank, mirrored walls, and the steam heat came up like a blanket, blotting out filth and rage, the frenzied hucksterings of Canal Street: ‘Whole world is going Helen Handbasket,’ Sasha said. ‘And Zim is drinking soup.’

  One oceanic bowl dispatched, he promptly ordered another. ‘Is like nymphomania of ducks, the more I’m full, the more I’m not,’ he said, beat
ific. ‘One Life to Live.’

  Scrabbling in the depths of the bowl, he fished up an alien presence, some slimy something that might once have been an eraser head or a diseased Band-Aid. ‘What hell is this?’ he muttered. But he looked delighted, slipped the relic into his shirt pocket, like a trophy. ‘My hobby,’ he explained. ‘I am collector of farces.’

  It was past ten; the Plum Blossom was almost deserted. Pleasantly drowsy, we nodded over our last bones and broth like unemployed sorcerers. ‘Broadway,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Is going no place,’ Sasha Zim replied.

  In out of the cold came an itinerant North African, a schlock peddler dressed in assorted rugs and bedding, a blue towel knotted loosely about his skull and a large tribal basket on his arm. Inside the basket was a wide range of trumpery – scarves, glass jewelry, batteries, joss sticks, Menudo buttons, Mets and Giants caps. But his staple was Darkie Toothpaste.

  Darkie’s trademark was a watermelon-grinning Sambo in a top hat and bow tie, his face full of glittering teeth. The African, who had no teeth of his own, was tall and immensely grave, his blue-black face ageless, his bandaged feet long and splayed like frogman’s flippers, and he held up five tubes of Darkie in a fan. ‘What hellshit is this?’ Sasha demanded, outraged.

  ‘I am of Senegal,’ the African said. ‘I call Ousmane.’

  ‘Where d’you get it? D’où vient le Darkie?’

  ‘My brother calls Ismaila. He steals by the Pearl River.’

  The Pearl River was a Chinese supermart, directly across Canal Street. I could see it from where I was sitting, a cinder-block barracks masquerading as a temple, festooned with streamers and dragon flags. ‘All. My brother steals all,’ said Ousmane. ‘My brother calls Ismaila, he steals the world away.’

  2

  All day and evening we drove round town in Sasha’s cab, and after midnight we drank. Right down at the foot of Broadway, in the back streets behind Bowling Green, there was a Killarney Rose that stayed open till four. It was a fine, clean place, and the bar itself was prodigious. An old man sitting drunk at the dark end said it was the longest bar in all Manhattan. The Irish Olympic swimming team was trained in a pool the exact same length.

  The drunk’s name was Barney. He was a wizened old party, a satchel of bones and parchment, and he had no teeth. At one time, he claimed, he had been a top-rated messenger on Wall Street. For forty years nobody was faster, no one more respected. ‘My aim was true, all right,’ he said, ‘but I lost my teeth.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have got dentures?’

  ‘I could of. Course I could. I wouldn’t sully my mouth, was all.’

  In his fat days, he said, the Killarney Rose had been his personal kingdom. He couldn’t walk in without he was mobbed by this man or that man; his money was no good here. ‘I was the wicked messenger, all right. Wicked,’ he said. Then his teeth went, and with them his friends. Overnight, it seemed, the bar was full of strangers. ‘Summabishes. Scum. Low-life summabish pantywaists,’ he called them. And these new bartenders were no better. ‘Donkeys, friggin’ Harps, straight off the friggin’ boats.’ Now he had to buy his own drinks.

  Come closing time, I followed Sasha Zim down to Battery Park. The night streets were hushed, our footfalls rang hollow, but a few strays were still about, sudden looming bodies.

  This neighborhood had used to be a graveyard. After dark, it was said, you could empty a machine gun and you’d hit no man you hadn’t aimed at. But that was before the Age of Realty. Now, luxury high rises blocked out the night skies, their lit windows making up new galaxies of their own. Even Lower Broadway tossed and turned.

  ‘Aim was true,’ mumbled Barney, lurching along behind us. ‘Summabishes got my teeth.’ It was a raw night, the damp so clinging that it seemed to leech at my flesh and suck, a vampire kiss. But Sasha didn’t feel it. Bundled safe inside a one-dollar flea-market greatcoat three sizes too big for him, he looked like the child warrior in the first scenes of Abel Gance’s Napoleon, spoiling for a snowball fight.

  At South Ferry, we ordered coffee and doughnuts from an Italian stall, where the counterman wore a chef’s toque, shocking white in the blackness. He greeted Sasha Zim as a regular. So did the customers – ferrymen, garbage workers, assorted night crawlers. ‘Is everybody knows me, in New York, on Broadway, every place,’ Sasha said. ‘Of course, is not all their fault.’

  A large black man in a long leather coat and a Russian-style fur hat stood off to one side. He had a penitentiary face, set rigid as Mount Rushmore, and a cast in his right eye, the whole orb washed milky white. But Sasha waded straight in, slapped him five high and low. ‘Yo, Rickey O,’ he cried, ‘what it is!’

  ‘The ship be sinkin’,’ Rickey O replied, impassive.

  ‘Hellshit happens,’ said Sasha. ‘Is natural fact.’

  Rickey O seemed used to him; almost to take him for granted. As if signifying that Sovericans, talking jive and kicking butt, were his natural homeboys. ‘What’s Russian for mo’fucker?’ he demanded.

  ‘Yob tvoyu mat, “fuck your mother,”’ Sasha told him. ‘In Soviet is friendly greeting, good way to saying “hi,” like “have nice day.”’

  ‘Yo, Tofumeat.’

  ‘Yob. Tvoyu. Mat.’

  Rickey O laughed out loud. Just for one moment, he let his sufferhead slide, and he unleashed a high-pitched squeal, almost a young girl’s giggle. ‘Yob tvoyu mat,’ he pronounced, each syllable soft and clear.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Sasha said.

  We retreated into the park. All along the embankment, in the shelter of the harbor wall, derelicts slept on benches or were bedded down in cardboard boxes.

  It was still drizzling, still rank. Far across the harbor, the floodlights trained on the Statue of Liberty made the faintest smothered glow.

  The statue was one of Sasha’s icons. In 1986, her centennial, he had worked this park on her behalf, vending burgers and Italian sausages, sweet or hot, under the slogan LET’S CELEBRATE MISS LIBERTY WITH MEAT-O-MAT BEEF PATTIES, and it was his insistence that we start our pilgrimage from her feet, so that we’d come to Broadway tempest-tost, the wretched refuse of alien shores.

  The morning’s first ferry left at nine. Most of the passengers were Japanese, with a smattering of Germans, Scandinavians, and Texans. But the star attraction was a group of school-girls from upstate New York, fifth graders decked out in full uniform – white socks and gray skirts, plum-colored blazers.

  There was also Rickey O. We found him on the lower deck, lurking by the food counter. But when we approached, he stared straight through us, had never seen us in his life. ‘Working. Is not to disturb,’ Sasha explained.

  ‘What work?’

  ‘Is Liberty Booster.’

  He dragged me upstairs, out into the sun and freezing cold. Slung from his shoulder was a satchel full of guidebooks, histories, and pamphlets, painstakingly marked for quotes. ‘Is like color commentation. Little touch of class,’ he explained.

  The great harbor, which had once teemed with tugboats and tramp steamers, freighters, ocean liners, now lay almost deserted. Only a few oil barges remained and, on the horizon, a lone yacht, its white sail dazzling, bent almost parallel to the waters.

  The whip of the wind sent me staggering, spun me clean around. But Sasha, snug in his greatcoat, would not let me go hide. Trapping me against the rail, he forced me to look up. And there she was, gigantic and sheer above us: Liberty Enlightening the Nations.

  Up close, she looked more daunting than inspiring. ‘This substantial figure of lady,’ Sasha read out, snout buried in his gazetteer. ‘Nose is four and half feet long, fingernail is thirteen inches by ten, and waist is thirty-five foot, more length than football first down.’

  It was no use. Viewed from underneath, a hugely pregnant housewife in a nightgown and brandishing a candlestick, Liberty’s expression was blank, her features vaguely sneering, with a sullen twist to her thick lips – a dead ringer for early Elvis.

  Behind us, the deck
was full of schoolgirls. Their teacher, snug inside an anorak, made them line up in rows, as if for a class photograph. Eyes front, they posed with straight backs and feet together, their knees raw-red and tears of cold streaming down their cheeks; and sang America the Beautiful, while the Japanese took pictures.

  Halfway through there was a small disturbance. One of the Japanese, in search of a wider angle, edged back towards the companionway. Right in front of him stood a young man dressed in drabs, a racial hybrid who looked half asleep. As the Japanese brushed by him, the hybrid turned, their faces just inches apart. For a moment they seemed frozen, locked in each other’s gaze. Then the Japanese appeared to stumble. Threshing for balance, he lurched, then bounced off like a pinball, caroming out of control. Luckily, Rickey O was there to catch him.

  The boat had swung around, begun the journey back, and now we faced the Manhattan skyline. At first it looked no different from its movies. Then the stone wall began to separate, resolve itself into planes and curves and spirals, rank after rank rising up like a city of cards. Sunlight caught on glass and steel, squares melted into oblongs, bowbends into angles until, as we moved beneath it, the whole prodigious construct seemed to swell up and shatter, kaleidoscopic, into myriad shards and flints, refractions, highlights, voids. At its heart, a bottomless gorge appeared: ‘Broadway,’ Sasha mumbled. His birthmark flamed, bright crimson, and he crossed himself. ‘Yob tvoyu mat,’ he said.

  So we came to the Great White Way.

  Down below, there was no sign of Rickey O, but the hybrid was wolfing down a hot dog with mustard, sauerkraut, and double ketchup. He still looked half asleep.

  When the ferry docked in Manhattan, we followed him, tracked him inland through Battery Park. He ambled idly, aimless, as if stoned, and when he reached the foot of Broadway, he didn’t duck into Roy Rogers so much as he oozed, slipslid away.