The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  His canvas was all-embracing. He wrote of Wall Street and Fifth Avenue, the Bowery, the Five Points, the Port; of newsboys and pawnbrokers, bulls and bears, street musicians, private eyes, flower girls, engravers on wood and steel, dealers in cheap watches, agents in indecent publications, gold beaters, fruit persons, bummers, bishops, the lost sisterhood, the heathen Chinee, and lawmen, fair and foul.

  Ever and again, he was drawn back to Broadway. ‘It is the world within itself,’ he wrote, anticipating Jon Bradshaw. ‘High and low, rich and poor pass along at a rate of speed peculiar to New York, and positively bewildering to a stranger. Fine gentlemen in broadcloth, ladies in silk and jewels, and beggars in squalid rags are mingled in true Republican confusion. From early morn till after midnight the throng pours on.’

  Only the trademarks had changed. Now gilded Mercuries flew out of pizza parlors, Knowledge and Experience stood watch over OTBs. I met Lush Life at the AT&T Building, a wedding cake built of nine mock-Parthenons, one on top of another, and she showed up as Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s – pink Capri pants and pink ballet slippers, bare midriff and knotted white shirt. She dragged at a cigarette holder like a poison-dart blowpipe, blew smoke in my face. ‘Quel rat,’ she said.

  It was snowing, a gray sleet that turned to slush on contact, and the sidewalk was ankle-deep in ooze. But Lush Life could not afford a trench coat, and any other coat would have ruined the look. So she stood shivering, her Cleopatra eyes smeared all over her cheekbones, while a man with a sandwich board paraded on the curb, extolling Le Club Hot-Stuff. With her dark glasses off, she looked fifteen.

  Joe Wojcik worked just opposite, in a defile off Nassau Street. The place was run by Israelis; travel posters for Tel Aviv and the Red Sea adorned the walls, and the menu mentioned gefilte fish; but the smell said ‘Eats.’ Behind a stainless-steel counter, Joe griddled eggs over easy, hash browns, stacks. A man somewhere past thirty and not yet fifty, he stood foursquare, his bare arms and throat covered in a fine brown fur like babyfuzz. A fat pink scar like a lightning bolt zigzagged across his scalp. Around it, he was almost bald.

  When he saw Lush Life, he did not clap his fingers to his mouth and screech like some other girls, but reached across the counter and shook her firmly by her hand. His knuckles were bloated, deformed, and his eyebrows tortured by scars. ‘Girl boxed pro,’ Lush Life explained.

  They went back a long way. When Lush Life first stepped out into New York, she had known nobody, nothing, but some of the girls who worked Port Authority had sent her to Sally’s Hideaway on West Forty-third Street, which called itself Transvestite Capital of the World. There Velma had saved her life.

  By now we had an unspoken deal: I would ask no questions, she would tell me lies. Nights in my cell at the Hotel Moose, Lush Life would sit cross-legged on the marigold coverlet and do her nails and spill herself till daylight. But only on her own terms. I must not pump, never try to pin her down. At the first query, she’d cut off dead and the face she turned on me then was a Medusa snakeshead. ‘I hate spies,’ she said.

  So now, waiting for Joe to finish his shift, we sat at a corner table, I kept my mouth shut tight and Lush Life studied her horoscope. ‘Don’t ask,’ she said. ‘A meeting with an intriguing stranger promises romantic complications. Follow your heart but exercise care.’ She puckered her brows, she pondered. ‘What if you have a careless heart?’ she inquired.

  Sally’s Hideaway had been a long, dark room behind a tiny, dark window. For her first night, she wore a white shirtwaister with matching white pumps, her hair cropped short as a Marine’s, sort of a tomboy look, like Jean Seberg in Saint Joan, only Joan of Arc did not wear pink satin panties with an inset purple heart. The whole dark room was jammed solid like a rush-hour subway train, and Grace Jones was blaring on the jukebox, I Need a Man, and this big black girl, she must have weighed two hundred pounds, in a red sequin dress and an Ann-Margret wig, she threw Lush Life up against the wall and ripped her dress off. And all the other girls watched. So you see. Lush Life begged the girl to hit her, hurt her, only please not to ruin her outfit. And the girl, some girl, the only way she’d see forty again was on a NO SPEEDING sign and her arms were as thick as Lush Life’s waist, all bloated and sagging, they made you think of rotting hams; anyhow, the bitch did hit and hurt her, then she ruined her outfit as well. She stripped Lush Life to her skin, out back by the john, where everyone could see and know the truth, that she’d had no silicone implants, no hormone shots, she didn’t even shave her legs. Plucked chicken, the woman called her. ‘I could of died,’ said Lush Life.

  Maybe she would have, only then another girl came, all squat and bandy in a spandex microskirt, and she didn’t hardly reach to the black girl’s chests, but she hit her one left hook and starched her stiff as Nancy Reagan’s smile. And this girl was Velma. She carried Lush Life inside the john and stuck her clothes back on with Band-Aids and safety pins, she took her home and made her hot chocolate and put her to bed, and the whole time she said just one thing, Shut up, bitch.

  In the morning there was no Velma, just Joe, a regular guy in a string undershirt and baggy pants, chugging beer in front of the TV. If it wasn’t for the lipstick and the silver-sparkle fingernails, he might have been some other person.

  This was a rarity. Most dressers, when they’d dug this deep into the Life, stayed femme night and day. But Velma and Joe split shifts. They’d been together twenty years, ever since Joe was in the navy, and sharing had become their second nature. They were like an old married couple, Lush Life thought. Each had their set role, their routine. They even looked alike.

  In the course of her recitation, she had slipped out of character. Now she remembered Holly Golightly, top banana in the shock stakes, and she went back into hiding behind her dark glasses, she practiced blowing smoke rings. ‘Where do you stand on enemas?’ she asked.

  When Joe got off work and came across to our table, he seemed to have stepped out of the 1940s. He wore a double-breasted blue suit with cuffs, corespondent shoes, a porkpie hat with a feather in the band. The uniform made him look even squatter and squarer, a Danny De Vito with silver-sparkle nails. ‘Hello, Life,’ he said, a flat nasal voice, muffled by crushed cartilage. ‘You wanted me?’

  ‘I always want you, chérie.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘You know how it is, so many places to do and people to be, La Vie en Rose to die for, and all so simply madly gay it makes you sick, you get old.’

  ‘A Jackson? A Franklin?’

  ‘If you don’t pay the piper, you don’t pay the rent,’ said Lush Life. ‘But, chérie, I tell you, his prices are insaaanne.’

  Out of his back pants pocket, Joe produced a billfold as fat as that and peeled off five Hamiltons. But when he pushed the money towards Lush Life, she stayed him. Her child’s hand fell on his wrist, bitten nails almost lost in tangled brown fur, and she gave him a look that had no one name, tenderness and mockery and challenge all mixed, a mirror look. ‘Velma,’ she said.

  ‘Shut up, bitch,’ said Joe.

  Lush Life kissed his mouth, took his cash. Her wet clothes clung to her body, and she was shivering again. ‘Quel prince,’ she said, then she was gone. A small puddle marked where she’d sat.

  With his hat on, and the pink scar hid, Joe looked more deadpan than ever. He had the classic face of the opponent – scattered nose and conch-shell ears, eyes tunneled deep behind cliff-hanging brows. He even talked in boxing rhythms, staccato flurries like combinations, that never stopped and started quite where you’d expect. ‘Three and eleven. But,’ he said, ‘I was robbed.’

  Three wins and eleven losses, and not one had ended in a clean knockout. ‘A lot. Of pushing and shoving, a whole lot of. Hurt. But I never did kiss canvas,’ Joe said. The flat voice met questions the same way he must have met fighters, head on, without fuss or feint. ‘What I was best at,’ he said, ‘I knew how to soak. Up punishment.’

  His room was on Ann Street, just around the cor
ner, at the top of five flights of stairs. The street was a survival from an earlier Broadway, when its people had still lived in houses. Hemmed in by monsters was a single row of red-bricks, walkups, complete with broken windows and iron fire escapes. Isaac Mendoza Book Co., the city’s oldest booksellers, huddled here. So did Adult Books & Peeps, XXX.

  In the 1840s, this had been the most glamorous spot on Broadway. Within fifty yards had stood the Astor House, the first of New York’s great hotels, built by John Jacob Astor at a cost of $1 million; Mathew Brady’s daguerreotype studio, where Abraham Lincoln, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe sat stiffly for frozen portraits; the offices of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald; and right at Broadway and Ann, most glorious of all, P. T. Barnum’s first American Museum.

  It must, in 1841, have been a staggering sight. According to Irving Wallace’s The Fabulous Showman: ‘One morning it was a hulking, drab, marble building, and lo, the next, it was a breathtaking rainbow, a kaleidoscope of color and curiosity.’ Outlandish oil paintings of birds, beasts, and creeping things covered the fourth story; illuminated glasses, boiling and bubbling like primitive neon, halted the night traffic. In its own moment, much like the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building later on, it was the one New York spectacular that no visitor dared miss.

  Joe Wojcik lived facing a defunct pawnbroker, at the top of five flights of stairs.

  The room itself was just a garret with a skylight. There were plastic geraniums in a window box, blue and yellow towels drying on a line, a metal-frame bed and a flowered china washbowl, and maybe a dozen sea lockers, piled high against the wall or ranged like stations of the cross at intervals across the floor. Obliterate the TV and the whole set could have played La Bohème.

  Faintly from Isaac Mendoza’s came the musty scent of caged books. Seven hats – homburgs, trilbies, stingy brims – hung on an ornate wooden rack. Above them, framed, was Joe’s honorable discharge from the navy. ‘Fourteen years. I’m here and still not. Unpacked,’ he said, indicating the trunks. ‘But what? The hey?’

  Fishing a six-pack of lukewarm Colt 45s out of a copper coal scuttle, he perched himself on the bed, made me hunker down on a locker. Thus set above me, he had control, was free to speak what he chose. ‘In the first place, I’m out. Of Brooklyn, Troy Avenue. In Crown Heights,’ he began. ‘My old man was a cop.’

  ‘What about Crazy Eddie?’

  ‘Wait,’ said Joe. ‘Just wait.’

  Before he died, he had lived. For twenty-eight years and change, he had been one of the crowd: ‘Your average transvestite. Altarboy prizefighter son of,’ he said, ‘a Polack cop.’

  The altarboy had come first. That was the start of everything. Sometime around his eleventh birthday, Father Cavanaugh had called him into the dark and touched him. Father Theosophus Tone Cavanaugh. It had felt just fine, relaxing, not strange at all. The only thing was, it made him see stuff.

  What kind of stuff? That was the problem. The things he saw had no titles. There was nothing defined, no one thing he could pick out and say Gotcha, cut and dried, like I saw a garden, I saw God, I saw ice cream, I saw up my own asshole. Instead, there was a whirl of colors and shapes that never stopped shifting and breaking up and reforming. Like looking into a kaleidoscope, only different. It was hard to define, and he never was any good with words, they never seemed to say what he thought they did. But, well, these colors and shapes, they were beautiful, the most beautiful things you’d ever see but they were scary also, unholy. So that you knew you shouldn’t fall in among them. Only deep down you wanted to. And any time you thought you had them nailed, and one certain image was just about to surface, the whole pack would be reshuffled, everything would just slipslide away, and you’d be right back where you started, locked out. And all this, of course, in real life, it was just a flash, a few seconds at most. But inside your own self it went on forever.

  As he talked, he kept glugging beer. He had the most seamless technique, would tilt his head back and open up his throat and pour down an entire can in a single swig. Stray suds ran down his chin and hung there, like raindrops on a wire. ‘What would you call that? A vision? A dream?’ he asked, idly belching. ‘I called it losing. My mind.’

  Whatever it was, it came on its own calling, not his. After Father Cavanaugh, a whole year went by undisturbed, maybe two. Then he was at some football game, he couldn’t remember what game now, but it was nearly over and his team was driving for the win. There was a big play. He jumped up on his feet. And he saw stuff again.

  To make a long. Story short. Over the years, these attacks, visitations, whatever you’d care to call them, kept recurring. And after he started boxing, they started to come more often. He felt good in himself; he had no problems that he knew of. His only curse was blushing. In every other respect, he was a hard case; a loner, who could not abide effeminates. Crimes against nature, weird stuff, made him sick. But every so often he’d be sparring, or just standing staring on some street corner, and he’d get this weird buzzing and numbness inside his skull, sort of like a tuning fork vibrating, and suddenly the colors and shapes would flood him, wash him away. Like nothing. On earth.

  Now the point. Though he could never get the frame to freeze, never isolate any one detail, certain patterns kept repeating. There were curves and billows, sudden swells like sails or backyard washing in the wind, swoops like birds, soft, fat moons. Most familiar of all, there was a black hole that kept growing and shrinking, flexing and sucking, like a mouth or asshole or maybe just space, a void.

  And one day he was unwinding after training, drinking a few beers and watching the Mets on TV. The commercials came on, and suddenly, out of nowhere, there was the same black hole, selling discount TVs. It was the mouth of Crazy Eddie.

  Velma was still new then. She had made her debut when Joe was in the service. On her first night, she had performed a striptease to ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ at his ship’s Christmas party. But she was not really a party girl. For a long time, she was a mousy little girl who could not stand to be loved, didn’t dare go outside her own room. Her evenings were spent in washing and mending her clothes, demure mail-order outfits, all drabs and beiges and fawns, with white collars and sensible flat-heeled shoes. She cut out coupons, saved travel brochures. No strange colors or shapes troubled her.

  But Joe could not escape them. By the time he retired from boxing, they were coming so hard and fast, they almost seemed routine. ‘You might say we’d took up. Housekeeping,’ he said.

  From where I sat squatted below him, my sightline took in a furry ankle, one brown-and-white wing-tipped shoe, a tattered edge of yellow towel, half a geranium, and an oblong of purpling sky. ‘So then came the big,’ Joe said. ‘Equalizer.’

  In his last fight, six rounds with some Panamanian kid, Maurizio Mendez he thought the name was, at the old Sunnyside Gardens he took his first real whipping. The kid was not schooled but he was strong, full of sap, and he could hit like a kicking mule. Joe did not go down but he was busted up good, and the ref stopped it after five. So that was it. He was twenty-four, an old man.

  So all right. So he goes back in his dressing room, the doc fixes him up, the promoter pays him off, his trainer takes his cut and runs, he gets showered and changed, and off he heads. For home. He walks out of the Gardens down underneath the el. The subway is roaring through right above him and then it’s gone. But the roaring is still there, inside his head. And all the colors and shapes fly in at once, fill him up. Too tight. He can’t contain them all, hold them in. Too much pressure. One more twist, and his skull will burst. And then, right then, out of the whirlpool comes the black mouth. Sucking in, sucking in. And this time it gets him, he has no choice, he falls. Right. In.

  When he came to, he was in the hospital, and they told him that he’d died, his heart had stopped and he was gone, twenty minutes or more, before they pulled him back.

  So then he knew Death by her right
name.

  Crazy Eddie.

  And that was the last of the colors and shapes. After he got out of the hospital, he took this room. The building was tied up in litigation then, still was, else it would have been pulled down or sold long ago. So he clung on by default. ‘Every day is borrowed. Time,’ he said.

  All of this had taught him sufferance. Nothing sickened him now, not weird stuff, not any stuff on earth but cruelty. So here he sat and roosted, and drank his Colt 45s. ‘Joe Wojcik lives. A boring life,’ he said. ‘But what? The hey?’

  And Velma? She thrived. As Joe had slowed down, drawn in on himself, so she had taken wing. She started to go out nights, strut her stuff in Sally’s Hideaway, and her whole attitude turned around. No more the meek and dowdy housegirl, she was cut loose: ‘A natural woman,’ Lush Life said.

  Her one consuming passion was clothes. She did not flirt, didn’t sleep around, didn’t care to get involved. On every other subject, she made no fuss and no demands. But clothes, that was something else. Each week she must have a new outfit, sometimes two. If she didn’t get them, blood flowed.

  ‘What can? You do?’ Joe said. Truth was, not a lot. It took him every minute of his working life to earn enough, keep her satisfied. But he did not begrudge her. They were partners, after all; her happiness was his own.

  Outdoors, it had grown dark. Rain flurried on the skylight, and Joe climbed down off the bed. Back on my own level, he shrank, became again a short bald man with silver-sparkle nails. Floor space was tight, and when I got up from the sea locker, we brushed together, my shoulder against his hip. He shied as if I’d struck him.

  Beyond the drying towels, out of sight, was a walk-in closet. Inside was Velma’s wardrobe. ‘Would you? Care to?’ Joe asked, not meeting my eye.

  ‘We wouldn’t take the same size.’

  ‘To look. I meant just. Look.’

  Rose-madder blushes mottled his forehead and neck. With face averted, he ushered me through a faded taffeta curtain. On the other side, lantern-lit, was an Aladdin’s cave.