The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  Morals had no office here. They were not distasteful, just irrelevant. Only a goddamn Communist would suggest that elitism was not a birthright, or that flaunting privilege was ungodly. In Caff Sosh, such questions were not taboo – they simply did not arise.

  You’d had to be there. Rehashed at this dry distance, it sounded tawdry, a touch absurd. Perhaps it really had been. But fun, Lord knows; so much fun. In eighteen months flat, Jack had run through his fortune, the entire $1.3 million, and he did not regret one cent.

  What had it gone on? ‘Things. Just things. Attractive people and their foolish schemes. And bar bills, of course,’ he said. ‘Oblivion.’

  He went downtown to Wall Street, The Street, and got a job at City Bank. He was in love with adventure. ‘Action,’ he said now. ‘I didn’t care what shape it took, or what it cost, just so long as it kept coming. And the market was action guaranteed. It was legalized gambling, and the wagering was no-limit.’

  It was also the most marvellous humbug. Not to offend the conventions, one must pretend to be truly at work, a small earnest cog in a mighty and God-blessed economy, when all the while one was hanging by his bootstraps, living and dying with every turn of the ticker tape, as hellhound a gamester as any back-alley crapshooter.

  At least the blind tigers were commodious here. The Wall Street of that era was a fastness, a giant fraternity house, as consoling to the backside as a split-log fire. It had its quota of cads and bounders, thieves and financial hoodlums, just as it always had and ever would; but it knew how to tie its bow ties.

  Liquor Jack, a clubbable man, fit right in. ‘My credentials? I was a funny fellow, I suppose. In those days a degree from Harvard Business School was not necessarily perceived as a plus. If anything, it was a black mark, made you look a little pushy, a show-off. The real plus was simply to be a right person, known to other right persons.’

  Two gangs ruled The Street, locked in uneasy alliance: Dusty Money, the great WASP merchant houses; and Our Crowd, the German Jews. Between them, they set the modes and mores of the whole financial world.

  It was a benign dictatorship, structured around a series of unwritten, immutable laws. Prime among them was the assumption, true or false, that business was a compact among gentlemen. Friendly competition was fine, guerrilla warfare was not. In the boardrooms of the Great, all mahogany and wrought iron, nothing essential had changed since the nineteenth century. Handshakes were still binding; ticker tape was the ultimate software. Above all, most sacred tenet of all: ‘A man’s word was his bond,’ Jack said, ‘if there were witnesses.’

  Given hindsight, he could see that the whole Byzantine edifice had hung on a single given – the innate blessedness of tradition, its divine right to command. But nobody questioned the franchise then, nobody but nobodies. One played by the rules, or one simply did not play.

  He found a model, a mentor. Paul Shields was an old man who drove a canary-colored Rolls with midnight trim, dated the model Suzy Parker, and kept her in rubber sheets: ‘D’Artagnan with a swizzle stick; an authentic giant of the Street, worthy of the name financier. When he was seventy-two, he got busted with two hookers, one white, one black, and the Daily News ran the headline “Two Gals in an Antique Bed.” It was his proudest moment.’

  But not his greatest achievement. In between escapades, Shields & Co. had helped create the block-trading boom, floating deals worth hundreds of millions: ‘And all done with mirrors. His own total capital was $15 million, barely a drop in the bucket, and here he was spawning these blockbuster trades, life-and-death gambles, as if they were bagatelles.’

  Nothing that came after could hope to equal that first rush: ‘Oh, we felt like God’s own. As if we had a secret knowledge, and nothing and no one could bring us to earth. We were,’ Jack said, ‘the Premium Select.’

  There I left him. And found him again next day. In between, I bumped into Lucius Havens on the street, his arms full of sandwich bags, laughing hard. When I mentioned Paul Shields, he laughed still harder. ‘A gentleman and a sport,’ he said. ‘I use to onyx his Oxfords, oh, a many, a many a time. He never broke a ten-dollar bill and never forgot to pass on a good thing to those less apropos. One Christian sinner, Mister Shields. And that Mister Jack Young.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Hoo-weeh!’

  D’Artagnan with a swizzle stick – Jack had used the phrase for Paul Shields, but it could have been himself. Already there’d been the fracas in the Village, outside the San Remo, when he’d punched an off-duty cop, got shot in the leg, and spent three months in Bellevue’s prison ward. Then there was the battle royal with six waiters in the Stork Club; ‘Sore Patron a Bear in Cub Room,’ the headline had read.

  ‘Situation fatal but not serious,’ said Jack. In those years, it didn’t seem to matter what atrocities he committed, he was always invited back. On one North Shore estate, asked to tea by some Dusty Money, he’d gorged himself on sticky cakes and finger sandwiches, then proceeded to push Grandmother’s grand piano into the swimming pool. The next week, he was asked to dinner. ‘I would submit to you that I was a scoundrel; a whoreson, flap-eared knave,’ he mused. ‘But a young knave, don’t you see, of impeccable lineage.’

  And then, quite suddenly, he was not so young anymore. He could never work out quite when or how it had happened, only that it had, and that it spoiled his sport utterly. Somehow, in a fit of absentmindedness, he seemed to have mislaid twenty years. Now he was plumped down blindly into the eighties, and all the rules were changed. Strange young men with Brooklyn accents and Nintendo eyes kept rushing past, shrieking. They were not Dusty Money, not Our Crowd, just brats, a pack of baby-faced killers.

  Orderly ascent, the art of gentlemanly accumulation, meant nothing here. These people were bomb-throwers, financial terrorists, who thought in billions, and billions now, and they were constrained by absolutely no limits. ‘It’s a whole new ballgame,’ they brayed. So it was.

  What was left was the morning after, a hangover for the ages. With vague surprise, Jack noticed that he had been married and divorced; that he had acquired a second wife, assorted offspring and obligations, all the trappings of the Real World; and that he could pay for none of them. So he changed jobs and made more money. Then he changed again, made even more. Still he couldn’t seem to equalize, and still he was not young again. ‘Embarrassed?’ he said. ‘One was mortified.’

  What had happened here? Abstractions and analyses were not Jack’s style. But his friend Michael Thomas took a gravedigger’s view. Quite simply, a world had died. And why? For the same reason that all worlds die. The old order was exhausted. The Street was America in miniature, and the American century was over. It had taken three things for granted – its primacy in morality, in war, and in wealth. On these three struts had been built its whole sense of mastery, of innate superiority. But the disasters of the seventies, its triple hegemonic cataclysms, had mortally wounded all three. Watergate had shot down its moral certainties, Vietnam its military, OPEC its economic. Religion had already bitten the dust. So had the cult of discipline.

  Ergo, anarchy. Before 1974, there’d been no such thing as a hostile takeover. But in the new order, nothing counted but the moment, and the will to win, which was polite parlance for the hunger to kill.

  This was no climate for kumquats. Where were they all, Jack Young’s contemporaries, his peers? Elsewhere. Those who had triumphed were either retired or out of sight, unreachable in their chauffeured Oldsmobiles, in their Park Avenue condos and Hamptons beachfronts. They were on boards, they hosted charity balls; they were everywhere but around. As for those who’d failed, they were long since dead of cirrhosis or, worse, at pasture on Long Island.

  Clearly, Jack had missed a turn somewhere. In the glow of his infatuation, one basic truth about The Street had eluded him. People came here to get rich.

  How come he hadn’t noticed? ‘Too busy having fun. Too contrary, too much in love with the game for the game’s own sake,’ he said. ‘And
then, of course, my jackass ego. I said “bullshit” to the witch doctor, and the good doctor shrank me.’

  Too busy having fun. It was an epitaph. In the days of his ascendancy, he could have cashed in easily, secured himself at a word. But the word had slipped his mind, and now what was left? ‘Picking flyshit out of pepper.’

  The Game Faces had inherited the earth. Across Broadway, a few blocks to the south, was Harry’s at Hanover Square, where the bond traders retired to swap war stories. It sat in the basement of The India House, a fine nineteenth-century merchant house, foursquare and discreet. But the discretion quit on entry. Standing in ranks around the rectangular bar, the bondsmen drank on the hoof, sweating men with wet mouths and ties all askew, and they howled.

  A few young women were also present, seated at tables along the low windows. The men called them gals, and they wore a generic look of trimness, crispness, like freshly washed romaines. ‘Tight,’ said my next-door neighbor, Louis, who had once bonded junk at Drexel Burnham. ‘Tight, tight, tight.’

  It was the female catchword this year, the ideal. Tightness of limb, tightness of mind; tightness of smile and soul. ‘It works, too,’ Louis said. ‘The tighter they get, the sharper they feel. The sharper they feel, the more they kick ass. And the more they kick ass, the more they want to kick some more.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘What are we here for, my friend?’

  His own ass-kicking statistics, however, were mired in a deep slump. Five years back, he had stood five feet six, weighed 280 pounds, and been worth $11 million. To celebrate reaching eight figures, he’d bought a sailboat and voyaged to Martha’s Vineyard. On his second day out, he had a heart attack. The doctor told him to diet or die. So now he weighed 162, 163, and he was worth loose change. But he stood almost five feet seven: ‘Which just goes to show,’ Louis said.

  Reverses did not dismay him. ‘The ebb tides of fate,’ he called them. Empty bags of skin hung off him in folds, made him look like a balding bloodhound, and he puffed at a dead corona that he was forbidden to light. Still he felt strong; he felt good. ‘I have seen the future,’ he said, ‘and it’s me, very rich.’

  Harry’s was among the last refuges of the entitled drinker. The current crusade against liquor had swept Wall Street with a withering blast, laying waste a century’s proud tradition. In Jack Young’s heyday, booze had been the market’s Esperanto. A personage like Joseph Thomas, Michael’s father, when he was CEO of Lehman Brothers, would conduct his operations from a steam room, stretched naked on a massage table, with a lit cigar in one hand and a vodka martini in the other, the Daily Racing Form spread out on his paunch and, for his emphysema, two clear plastic tubes running from his nostrils to an oxygen tank. As fashion statements went, it had seemed bold but not outrageous. Now alcophobia was run amok. The merest whiff of merriment on the breath after lunch and you were cast into outer darkness, a pariah.

  Even at Harry’s, the revelries were dimmed. For every bullhorn bourbon tosspot, there were two joggers on white-wine spritzers. As for Louis himself, it was true that he swilled J & B. But he was also in AA: ‘For the action.’

  It was The Street’s latest brotherhood. In this dry season, AA was fast replacing the men’s club as sanctum sanctori, the prime place to wheel and deal. Each morning before the market opened, and each evening after it closed, the smart money would gather in a basement on Trinity Place and work the floor, swapping tips and hatching plots, exchanging true confessions. It was cheaper than buying a round, Louis said: ‘And the sex is out of sight.’

  Liquor Jack was not amused. Of all the fads that had combined to render Wall Street hideous, good health stank foulest. His second wife, my incumbent Duchess, had once dared to speak of it in his connection. But only once. ‘Cast off the antic crutch of sin?’ he’d said. ‘I rather fancy not.’

  These days he occupied a desk at Smith & Co. The Smiths were two brothers, John and James, out of Brooklyn. Their father had been Jewish, their mother Irish; the brothers themselves mixed cunning with combativeness: ‘Tire-iron street fighters,’ said Jack, ‘but tire-iron fighters with direction.’

  John Smith, the kingpin, sat in the middle of a long table like a conveyor belt. Flanked by his hirelings, he presided like Prince John in the banqueting scene of Errol Flynn’s Adventures of Robin Hood, with short-term traders standing in for courtiers and computer printouts for the chicken bones, flung recklessly about the festive board. But this was no smoothie-chops Claude Rains, all pout and purr. On the contrary, he was wound tight as a steel tourniquet. In his early forties, dandified but deadly in striped shirt and canary suspenders, he wore his hair cropped close, rarely smiled, but cracked his knuckles constantly. All his motions were fastidious, spare, and his stare indifferent, yet he gave an impression of furious energy – rage, just barely reined in.

  The image did not offend him. It was true, he said, he was a human timebomb. To defuse himself, he had to run eight miles a day, pump iron till he hit the wall. Otherwise, his systems would overload: ‘Which would be counterproductive,’ he said.

  His satellites seemed less controlled. Sweaty youths, they hunched squinting over computer screens, bawled into phones and thin air. What exactly they did was mysterious. But it seemed a lot to do with anal sex. Apparently, the world was full of fucking assholes, all looking to fuck each other up the fucking ass, and the only fucking way to survive was to fuck them up the fucking ass before they fucked you. No shit.

  Crouched low in a separate cubicle, like a sniper in a foxhole, Liquor Jack placed orders and collected tips, counted down to four o’clock. His phone manner was hushed, conspiratorial. Sparse hairs lay like mist across his pink scalp. From time to time, when negotiations bogged down, he would reach up absently, wearily, to smooth them.

  Somewhere else in the room, out of sight, a shrill voice lashed out, reflexive. ‘Fuck him!’ it shrieked. ‘He can stick his fucking tongue up my fucking asshole!’

  ‘I could,’ said Liquor Jack, ‘use a drink.’

  At Michael’s I, right next door to the AA basement, he was safe. It was a bolthole, a place where he and like renegades could gather unseen, in search of surcease of sorrow, and drink themselves into quietude. Because it reminded him of an airport lounge, Jack called it the Terminal Bar: ‘And I mean that sincerely,’ he said.

  His drink was vodka tonic with no fruit, his best game remembrance. As the evening drew on, and discontents deepened, his drawl grew more Louisville. Kentucky speech rhythms, lazy and arching, worked just fine for indifference, hauteur, but were not so hot for humility: ‘I would submit to you, it is no crime,’ he murmured, ‘to be conscious of who you have been, and who you are.’

  The murmur was a trademark. Now that he had joined the Seniors’ Tour, he’d traded in the sozzled war whoop for the wry grimace, the smile at the foot of the scaffold.

  What would set him to whooping again? It was hard to say. Once he had wanted more; now he just wanted out. If somehow he made a killing, he’d back up a station wagon to the bank, take out every cent and just start driving. Or forget the killing. All he wanted was a moiety, one used four-wheel vehicle and a road to anywhere.

  On the bar lay a ten-dollar bill. When the time came to pick it up and go home, Liquor Jack let it slip through his fingers. It fell between his feet, and he bent to pick it up. Then he changed his mind; let it lie.

  6

  Lush life had a friend called Velma whose square name was Joe Wojcik, a short-order cook. Before slinging hash, she had been a truck driver, a stevedore, a security guard, and before all of that, she’d been dead.

  The greasy spoon where she worked lay neatly in my path, a few blocks north of Wall Street. Lush Life suggested that I stop off, get acquainted. ‘Ladybeard, you’ll love her,’ she promised. ‘She is nothing but a lady.’

  ‘So how come she died?’

  ‘Crazy Eddie done it.’

  The reference was to commercials. For fifteen years or more, before bankruptcy nailed
him, Crazy Eddie had been a New York institution. Who the real Eddie was, hardly anyone knew or cared. Some Syrian recluse who’d made and lost a fortune selling discount stereos and videos, electronic toys. But his TV alter ego was everywhere, a chubby balding actor with a mouth big, wide, and bottomless as the abyss, who peddled software in bug-eyed frenzy, a wail like a police siren. ‘Crazy Eddie cannot, shall not, positively will not ever be undersold,’ he’d shriek. ‘His prices are insaaanne.’

  What was this to do with Joe Wojcik’s dying? ‘Don’t ask,’ said Lush Life. ‘It doesn’t become you.’

  I did not argue. The hiatus was welcome, for Broadway was going through a bloated patch, pigged out on too much allegory. In the half-mile since Bowling Green, I’d passed enough Romanesque statues, Grecian columns, and mythological bronze reliefs to surfeit Caesar’s Palace. Where they fronted major corporations, they’d had a certain pompous splendor. But hereabouts they stood guard over warrens of one-room offices, filled with private eyes and divorce lawyers, patent healers and defrocked chiropractors.

  The sidewalks were frenzied here. Though there seemed nothing worth racing for, everybody raced regardless. Perhaps it was just force of habit. For this had ever been striver’s row. ‘The great fighting ground of the city,’ Richard Harding Davis had called it. And James D. McCabe, in his 1879 Lights and Shadows of New York Life, wrote: ‘Every class, every shade of nationality and characters, is represented here.’

  McCabe had been Broadway’s greatest chronicler. A Virginian Confederate and war journalist, he only came north when he was already dying. But his final years were spent tramping Manhattan, ten hours every day. He was not a fine stylist but his eye was sharp, his curiosity boundless. He saw New York and Broadway, not as platforms for distant reflection, but simply as astonishments, a magical and inexhaustible bazaar, through which he swam dazzled, appalled, above all in love.