The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  ‘What crazyman?’

  ‘Robert Blue. Little bit stick of body, not man or meat, but he’s beating sweet holy hell out of drums, believe it, is putting on whipping but good.’ His birthmark glowed. ‘Is beautiful. Is all.’

  Blue had worked the lunch crowd, backing himself with tapes of John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, and his battles with the string quartets across the lawn were legend, a bloodless race war. Sasha had become his lone white foot soldier. In time, he’d even been entrusted with passing the hat. Then the summer faded and the cops came, took Blue away in a paddywagon. Possession of stolen goods, the charge was. To whit, silver plate and candlesticks, a pearl choker, assorted jade: ‘Taste was superb, sentence was eighteen months,’ Sasha said, ‘and Zim is getting Max Roach drums.’

  It was hereabouts that Broadway’s push north had first gathered steam, begun to acquire real purpose. In its infancy, when its population was under a thousand, New York had ended in a stockade fence at Wall Street. Only Broadway had reached beyond. Adventuring, scouting like an advance guard, it kept driving up the island, setting up series of base camps. At each in turn it paused, consolidated its gains, just long enough for the rest of the city to catch up. Then it ploughed ahead once again.

  We followed it by City Hall Park. Beyond Chambers Street, the perspective shrank, turned intimate again. In the 1850s, this had been Upper Broadway, the heart of high fashion.

  A. T. Stewart’s department store, the Bloomingdale’s of its moment, had stood where Ellen’s now primped, and from there had flowed the nightly parade of carriages and curricles, broughams, cabriolets, promenaders, back and forth to Union Square.

  It was this ritual that had first made Broadway synonymous with the Night. Thumbing through a nineteenth-century anthology, Sasha had come upon a story from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, circa 1878: In carriages we discover opera and ball dresses, while men on sidewalk move along saunteringly, nearly every one with cigar in his mouth, and crimson tips of weeds glow in air like so many setting suns, he read. These are Men who make World.

  Nowadays, the tone was less highflown. When fashion moved on, these blocks had turned into the Dry-Goods District. After that, they’d become a midden of sweatshops and wholesale outlets. The buildings were mostly cast-iron manufacturies, their windows garish with chintz and cotton and gold lamé, and the night’s cavalcade was of wage slaves running to the subway. But the basic equation was unchanged: Though well-dressed people preponderate, Sasha read, workmen in fustian and poverty-stricken workgirls appear in stream, besides threadbare adventurers and abject devotees of gutter.

  Workmen in fustian, threadbare adventurers, abject devotees of the gutter – we had these three covered. All that was lacking were the poverty-stricken workgirls, and Sasha knew just where to find them. Leaving Broadway, he went gusting down side streets, past neon-sculpture shops and charcuterie takeouts, designer ice-creameries, slimming salons. At a corner, behind blank windows, was the Baby Doll Topless.

  It was more neighborhood saloon than fleshpot. Warehouse workers and messengers, salesmen from Canal Street, and truckers fresh out of the Holland Tunnel commingled at the bar, their backs turned to the stage. If they peered into the backbar mirror, they could see women dancing with no clothes on. But not many made the effort. Baseball spring training had just begun, and the talk was all of phenoms, trades, rotator cuffs.

  EmCee Marie was a ChiSox fan.

  She sat brooding over a boilermaker, a dark and muscular presence in a bomber jacket, with thick, black hair sheared short in a Brillo-pad shag and eyes very fierce, unblinking. On her right wrist were tattooed the word Pudge and a scarlet heart pierced by a whaling harpoon. ‘Only three things are forever,’ she said. ‘Death, taxes, and Carlton Fisk.’

  The voice was startling. The softest Tennessee drawl, it didn’t match the leathers or the eyes. Nor did the body compute. Lushly curved, it belonged to a Vargas calendar girl. But access was barred by studs, steel chains.

  Nights, she worked topless uptown. She rarely got home before dawn, and when she did, she could not seem to sleep. Sometimes she worked at her paintings, or she played solitaire. More often, she hit the bars: ‘To get tired. To get some rest,’ she said.

  She was twenty-eight, had been in New York six years. Before that, she’d been married with kids in Knoxville, where her husband had owned bodyshops and a muffler franchise. When Marie was pregnant the third time, she miscarried. It was a sign, she believed, and she came north with a bluegrass band. Through summer and fall, she shacked up with the mandolinist, toured up and down the Northeast. Then it turned cold in Trenton, New Jersey, and the mandolinist took homesick. The morning after, Marie turned in her wedding ring for art supplies, caught a bus into Manhattan.

  At Port Authority, she asked directions to the nearest cabaret. It had proved to be Show World, a sexual supermarket near Times Square. There she’d won a job as a Real Live Woman, who sat behind a plate-glass window in an open negligee and performed whatever lonely acts men commanded. A phone connected her fishtank with their booth, and they paid a quarter a minute. More often than not, they just wanted to watch her fingers move. But there were others who liked to talk, and the stuff that ran from their mouths had seared, was vitriol: ‘Can’t wash out the stain like cum,’ said EmCee Marie. ‘Won’t wash out, period.’

  Sasha had returned to his taxi. In his absence, Marie ordered up more boilermakers, and many more after those. Sometime between six and midnight, when her next work shift began, we wound up back in her studio, above a Broadway button factory.

  Her room was as spacious, airy, and impersonal as a high-school gym. Canvases hung along the walls, but all were covered with dustsheets; even her easel was disguised. Apart from Sasha’s drums, peeping coyly out from behind a nest of shoeboxes and carrier bags, the only private touches were the brass bed itself, which had belonged to a great-aunt, and an outsize autographed picture of Carlton Fisk.

  ‘He’s the best. Just the best,’ said EmCee Marie. She’d loved him since she was in eighth grade and he was a rookie catcher with Boston. Now he was the oldest position player in the Major Leagues, a patriarch, the calm and all-wise image of the father that should be and never was. He was always going down with horrendous injuries, his face smashed in, his knees ripped to shreds. Yet he kept coming back, the same stoic, rocklike Pudge: ‘Rip out his heart, and he’d still hit two-eighty, drive in seventy-five,’ she said. She poured herself a drink. ‘He’s just the best,’ she said.

  Sprawled on an overstuffed beanbag, she had shed the bomber jacket, wore only jeans and a ChiSox T-shirt. The body revealed was so opulent, it looked almost cartoonish. But the snapping-turtle eyes, the hedgehog quills of black hair, did not encourage liberties. Nor did the raw whiskey mouth. ‘Why’re you here?’ she demanded.

  ‘You asked me.’

  ‘Quiet,’ said Marie. ‘I’m drinking.’

  Across the studio was a small side room, which she called her gallery. Its door was padlocked; the key hung on a chain from her throat, squeezed tight between her breasts, like a crucifix. ‘I won’t show you,’ she said. ‘Don’t even think of thinking I will.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘I won’t.’ She rose up a little unsteady, touched the brass bed for balance. Her scent, up close, was of pine and damp peat. ‘Why EmCee?’ I asked.

  ‘Masked Cocksucker,’ Marie replied. ‘What else?’

  On a small bookstand beside the brass bed sat the Baseball Encyclopedia, a Gideon Bible, novels by Faulkner and Dashiell Hammett, the Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor, and Ashley Montagu’s The Elephant Man.

  Picking up this last, Marie went searching for a quote. ‘The best. It’s just the best,’ she said, softslurring, and she read out loud: ‘As a specimen of humanity, Merrick was ignoble and repulsive; but the spirit of Merrick, if it could be seen in the form of the living, would assume the figure of an upstanding and heroic man, smooth browed and clean of limb, with eyes
that flashed undaunted courage.’

  When we came here, we’d carried a pint of I. W. Harper. Now it was three parts empty, and Marie threw the book against the wall. ‘First drawing I ever did. The Elephant Man,’ she said. ‘I read that passage, it was the middle of the night, of course I didn’t have any drawing paper or anything like that, I just stripped a page out of the phonebook, the first thing that came to my hand, and I drew it in one line.’ She poured the last drink but did not down it. She turned the glass in her hand, as if studying its light. ‘All I saw,’ she said, ‘it was just a line.’

  Her gallery proved to be a small, square box, eight feet by eight. On the far wall was a glass box, its contents blacked out, and in front of it a swivel chair, on which I now sat. Marie shut off the overhead light, shut the door, and left me alone in darkness. Then the glass box lit up from within, presenting a series of slides.

  They showed variations on famous paintings. Mantegna’s Agony in the Garden came first, then Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, then a Courbet studio scene, a Van Dyke cavalier. After that, the exact sequence blurred, but it included Matisses and Manets, a Watteau, a Franz Hals. The single common denominator, at least to my own eye, was that all were dominated by central male figures.

  The style was De Mille Realist. What Marie had done was take the originals, copy them faithfully, then filter them through a Technicolor nightmare, so that they took on the tones of lobby cards or depression postcards. The result was a world of Old Testament sunsets, scarlet eyes, purple blood, and spun-gold tears.

  There was more. To each scene, the figure of Marie herself had been added, black-masked and nude, crouching at the feet of the leading male and delicately, chastely, performing fellatio. The male organs projected stark white, just the tip of the glans swallowed up, and their owners stood with fists clenched, heads flung back, in attitudes of torment and abandon, a terrible helplessness. As for EmCee Marie, who could say? Her mask hid all.

  The Elephant Man came last. It was smaller than the rest, not the line drawing she had described, but an ink wash. John Merrick stood in shadow, his silhouette barely suggested. Only his massive head and his cock caught the light. On Marie’s right ring finger, gently cushioning his balls, was a small circular mirror.

  Trapped in the dark, I sat very still, I started counting. At fifty-six the slide shut off and the light overhead returned. Back in the studio, the I. W. Harper was all gone, and Marie was zipping up her bomber jacket, preening herself for work.

  She looked like a woman with no clothes on under her clothes. ‘My maiden name was Carbone. Anna Maria Carbone,’ she said. ‘My mother was a strong woman.’

  A weight lifter lived in the room above. Sharp at eleven, tonight and every other night, he began to clean and jerk. After each failed lift, the crash of tumbling barbells shook the building like a wrecker’s ball. EmCee Marie, making up in a wicker-framed mirror, found that the glass would not keep still. At every thump, her image lurched and twisted, veered out of control. But she did not show irritation. She just reached out and held the glass flat, in place. ‘My mother had five daughters; she raised them all herself,’ said Marie. ‘She was just the best.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘Get out of my house.’

  Her hand was steady; her voice quite clear. The alcohol, it seemed, had killed its own effect. ‘I don’t want you here. I don’t want you here,’ she said. At her doorway, she stood rubbing the Pudge Fisk tattoo on her wrist. Her black hair bristled, stiff and angry, but her eyes were merely dulled, out of sync. ‘Are you a fool?’ Marie asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ she said. ‘It’s a living.’

  9

  On Franklin street, as she left Peggy Doyle’s Restaurant, a woman was run into by two black youths. One of them knocked her off-balance, the other snatched at her purse. But the woman, though she was not young, refused to let go. She was a small but elegant package, impeccably wrapped in a dove-gray suit with matching picture hat, knee-length snake-skin boots. Her purse was dove-gray also, studded with gold fittings, with a gold-link chain that she wrapped around her wrist, and she swung it like a loaded slingshot, skulling the youths with calm expertise, till they scuttled off up Broadway.

  As soon as they were safely gone, a uniformed cop came by and began to batter the woman with questions. How were the youths dressed? Could she describe them? Would she recognize them again? ‘Know them anywhere,’ the woman declared.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘They’re my clients.’

  The woman was Enid Gerlin, Attorney-at-Law, and she was on her way to 100 Centre Street, the Criminal Courts Building. Much like the theaters uptown, the courthouse was of Broadway but not on it. A massive art deco mausoleum, it sat lowering across Foley Square, the image of dread and all abandoned hope.

  In its moment, 1933, this place had been much celebrated. It went up on the site of the Collect, the city’s eighteenth-century garbage dump. Its architect, Harvey Wiley Corbett, was the high panjandrum of moderne, as deco was then called, and 100 Centre was hailed as his life’s masterwork – not just another courthouse, but the New Age incarnate, a paean to Justice, The Awful Awe of the Law. What that boiled down to was a railway station without trains.

  Monumental it was, gun-metal gray, with vaulting doorways and dim empyrean ceilings, adamantine pillars, sculpted brass. Back in the age of the shoe, its marble floors must have echoed superbly, a symphony of grave and measured treads. In the sneaker age, they just squeaked.

  Across the vast frozen steppe of the lobby, an army of dark youths came gliding, shaking and baking, a moveable A-Z of basketball struts and strides: ‘You’d think this was a playground,’ Enid Gerlin said. ‘And you’d be right.’

  In the cafeteria, Shaquille Cleamons, nineteen, munched on a sugar roll. One of Enid’s past clients, he went six feet six, 170 pounds, a praying mantis in sky-blue-and-yellow Nikes, gray sweats, a black bandanna: ‘We only be hangin’,’ he said. ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘From the beginning,’ said Enid Gerlin.

  ‘An accident was all.’

  ‘You were hanging out?’

  ‘Shootin’ hoops. In the yard. We just be chillin’, shootin’ hoops.’ He bobbed and weaved in his seat, pantomiming a spin move, a jumper, a dunk. ‘Then the gun go off.’

  He was out of East New York, the Linden Houses on Stanley Avenue, right across the street from Gershwin Junior High. Down the block from Gershwin was the yard, ‘like a park, just no grass.’ It featured a basketball half-court, a wire cage, one hoop, two floodlights on a pole. On summer nights, it was always full of action till late, one, two o’clock in the morning, but most nights in winter it was deserted.

  Last night had been an exception. One of the Jacks from the projects, Leavell Robinson, had showed up sporting a brand-new pair of Air Jordans. How he came by them, don’t inquire. But, of course, he needed to strut them. So he went out in the park, it must have been round midnight, in the cold and drizzling rain, and his homeboys with him – Tyrone, Kenny, K-mart, Shaquille Cleamons – to keep him company.

  Shaquille’s skull was lopsided, the work of a drunken obstetrician. Burn scars puckered his left cheek, drawing up the eye into a permanent squint. ‘So you were hanging in the yard?’ Enid Gerlin said. ‘So what then?’

  ‘DOA.’

  The trouble started around one. Leavell and his homeboys, they called themselves the LHCs, the Linden Houses Crew, and they were tight. Gershwin was their yard, their turf. Then three others came by. Shaquille had seen them around, they used to hang on Van Siclen, just down from Key Food, but he didn’t know them to speak to. One of them, he thought, was called Money. The others he couldn’t say. Anyhow, they came by and they took one look at Leavell’s Air Jordans, they started laughing. Then the one they called Money, he went in the cage, he was moving across the yard with his hand reached out, his middle finger curled way back and beckoning. But Leavell stood him off. He had a
temper, Leavell, he’d jump in any fool’s face. So the two of them, they came together. No punches were thrown, not that Shaquille could see, just a lot of grabbing and shoving, a lot of language. Then Money swung something blunt and dark, it had a dull sheen, could have been some kind of metal. It hit someplace upside Leavell’s head, and it made a sound like pulping, like when you burst a ripe fruit. Leavell sort of stumbled, then he turned to run, but Money grabbed him back. Money had a gun. He had Leavell around the throat; Leavell was struggling to bust loose, but Money was too strong. Shaquille shut his eyes. There was one shot. Then everybody started running.

  ‘So what then?’ Enid Gerlin asked.

  ‘I was running, then I stopped,’ said Shaquille. Icing sugar smeared the inside of his loose lower lip, stark white against raw pink. ‘I went back to look.’

  ‘How long after the shot?’

  ‘Two minutes, three.’ The squint made him look like a child with an old man’s eye. ‘Everybody was back inside the cage.’

  ‘Was Leavell dead?’

  ‘Didn’t have no shoes on.’

  Police came, then the ambulance. From the far end of the yard, underneath the hoop where the floodlights were, Shaquille could not see much, just the medics crouched down with torches and Leavell’s feet. He wore white athletic socks. ‘So what then?’

  ‘They call the morgue.’

  By now a crowd had gathered, people were pushing and yelling, trying to get a better view. Leavell’s mother came down, she started to scream. Everybody was all excited. But there was nothing left to look at. Shaquille stayed close by K-mart and Tyrone, down under the hoop. The basketball was just lying there. So Tyrone picked it up and flipped it in the air. Then he took a shot, sort of a fallaway hook, and K-mart rebounded. Then someone else took a shot, and someone else. ‘Did you?’ Enid asked.

  ‘Didn’t shoot. Just played D,’ Shaquille told her, sucking on his sugared lip. The morgue wagon came, Leavell’s body was removed, the crowd began to break up. ‘So what then?’