The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  It was the city’s first. There had always been playhouses on Broadway, but they’d sprung up haphazardly, just like the street itself: Edwin Booth’s Winter Garden at Bond Street and Niblo’s Garden at Prince, Wallack’s at Broome, the Astor Place and the Broadway Theater itself, where Adah Isaacs Menken used to climax her performance in Mazeppa by charging up the central aisle strapped, seemingly naked, aboard an Arab stallion. Then there were the concert halls, like the New Oriental and Harry Hill’s on Houston, ‘where murder is almost unknown’; the minstrel shows, like the Christy’s Mechanical Hall at Grand; and the first of the skin palaces, Wood’s Museum, where the Lydia Thompson Burlesque Co. displayed four strapping blondes laced into black corsets and sporting pink-flesh silk stockings. ‘If this is not the end, what is?’ James Gordon Bennett’s Herald shrilled.

  Union Square was the salty answer.

  Within its bounds, all forms of entertainment, high and low, were tumbled in one bed: ‘Vice wears a fair mask at every corner,’ wrote Junius Henry Browne, ‘and Art smiles in a thousand bewitching forms. Hotels and playhouses and bazaars, and music halls, and bagnios, and gambling hells are radiantly mixed together; and any of them will give you what you seek, and more sometimes.’

  At one extreme was the Academy of Music, an opera house whose boxes were reserved for Mrs Astor’s four hundred; at the other Tony Pastor’s, the first house of vaudeville, whose reigning muse was Maggie Cline, the Irish Queen, with her boxing ballad, ‘Throw Him Down, McCloskey.’

  Off Broadway, the back streets filled with basement bars and hockshops, theatrical boardinghouses; and the sidewalk outside Keith’s Union Square Theater so overflowed with vaudevillians seeking work that it was known as the Slave Market. ‘Happy days,’ Davitt said, ‘filled with song, dance, and loathing.’

  He treasured one feud in particular. As recorded by George Jean Nathan, a certain Aug. Allaire of the Three Bounding Allaires wrote to a showbiz publication protesting that Flo D’Arcy of the D’Arcy Sisters had pirated his trademark one-armed back spring. In the next issue, Miss D’Arcy replied:

  DEAR EDITOR,

  I dislike to be unladylike, as my conduct as a member of the famous team of D’Arcy Sisters who have played successfully in all parts of the world is well known to all my dear friends in vaudeville to be strictly ladylike, but I can’t let the remarks of one, Aug. Allaire, of the Three Bounding Allaires, go by unnoticed. I want to say to Aug. Allaire that if he claims I stole the one-armed back spring from him he is a liar, as I copied the one-armed back spring from Oscar Delarmo, of Delarmo and Astor, with his kind permission. Mr Oscar Delarmo has used the one-armed back spring for twenty years and twenty years ago Aug. Allaire of the Three Bounding Allaires, was probably still sweeping out some Baltimore Lunch place on the Bowery.

  Faithfully yours,

  Miss Flo D’Arcy, Of the D’Arcy Sisters

  – booked solid for one year.

  After 1900, Broadway had pushed on and taken the Rialto with it. The luxury hotels and theaters were boarded up, torn down, and Fourteenth was reduced to a bargain basement, notorious for its bootleg furs and contraband silks; its nine-cent record stores; its pretzel and chestnut vendors, its sheet-music peddlers; and the ninety-eight synchronized time-pieces in the windows of Korn’s Klock Korner.

  Came the depression. The square filled with Wobblies and soapbox orators. On March 6, 1930, some two thousand Communists demonstrated there and fifty thousand came to gawk. Grover Whalen, Mayor Jimmy Walker’s police commissioner, refused permission for a march down Broadway to City Hall. When the Communists started marching anyway, they were met by mounted police. Then, wrote Edward Robb Ellis, ‘hundreds of cops and detectives, swinging nightsticks and blackjacks and bare fists, rushed into the marching columns.’ The marchers fought back, and the law rushed harder. ‘A dozen plainclothes-men and uniform cops beat and kicked two unarmed men until they nearly fainted. Women screamed. Men shouted. Blood began to trickle down faces. Soon a score of men sprawled on the ground.’

  It was the worst riot that New York had seen this century. No guns being used, only twenty major injuries were reported, a hundred hospitalizations. But the bitterness cut deep: Union Square did not recover.

  By World War II, when the infant Davitt arrived, the Academy of Music was a rattrap movie house. For fifty cents, twenty-five at matinees, it offered a double feature plus eight live vaudeville acts. On weekends, it threw in free popcorn and pretzels.

  Everything here was secondhand, used up, despoiled. The loudest sign on the block, gold and scarlet neon, read ALL MERCHANDISE REDUCED 200%. It was advertising the hostesses in a taxi ballroom.

  DANCING, it also said, IS A SOCIAL NECESSITY.

  In this place, Davitt had grown up solitary: ‘A little queer,’ he said. He was never any good in school, dropped out at fifteen, but he was an obsessional reader. He’d pick up books at random, devour them piecemeal. So his knowledge had come in a jackdaw’s ragbag. He could quote from Dante and Walter Winchell, the Book of Job, Dale Carnegie and Mickey Spillane. But he did not know who Lenin was, or Jackie Robinson.

  Union Square was no place for little queers. When he was twenty, he got tired of the sight of his own blood. He’d had enough of healing just to get scarred again, and he moved to the West Village. He wrote for the pulps; he doubled as the Master Writer. But he found that he missed his roots. However he had hated and feared the place, Union Square had hooked him. ‘It was the hopelessness,’ he said. ‘The ugliness and meanness, the whole squalid mess.’ He shook his head wearily, fondly, a mother hen clucking at a wayward chick. ‘A runt,’ he said. ‘But my runt.’

  He recalled the day and hour when the pact was sealed: ‘May fourteenth, 1971, two o’clock in the afternoon. I had just finished a story. Blood in the Blender, it stank. I was living in the West Village, Bank Street, and hanging out at Julius. That was the time right after the Stonewall Riot; the whole gay pride thing was blowing up and it wasn’t me.’ He spoke with measured cadence. In the same steady rhythm, he tapped a menthol cigarette six times on its packet, passed a match three times, sucked in twice. ‘I never was a joiner,’ he said. ‘I just wasn’t made for groups, coalitions, whatever. Ever since I knew I liked boys, I hated the word gay, it seemed so false somehow. The old names were better; they were vile and dumb but they didn’t lie. Faggot, flit. Other, I always liked that.’

  After four puffs, his cigarette was thrown away, a fresh smoke produced. Six taps, three passes, two sucks: ‘I was past thirty. A word-surgeon with no patients. And blood in the blender,’ he said. ‘I packed up my belongings in a brown paper bag. I came back to Union Square.’ He tossed aside the cigarette, reached for a third. ‘To be Other,’ he said.

  By Grace Church, walking but not seeing, he’d bumped against an old and evil-smelling Greek who trundled a push-cart full of stuffs – shoelaces, cheap cottons, polyester pants. Jarred, the Greek stopped dead, measured Davitt with a fierce glare. He was a stranger, but not a bit shy. Oozing garlic, he grabbed the Doctor by the arm, commenced to rattle him like a cocktail shaker. Then he brought his dirty mouth up close, he hissed. ‘Queer. You dirty little queer,’ he said. And Davitt was back home.

  ‘Saul on the road to S. Klein’s,’ he said. Arriving at Union Square, he bought himself a cheap notebook, plumped down beneath the hooves of George Washington’s horse. ‘And there I made my stand. Or sit,’ he said. ‘The second coming of Joe Gould.’

  Gould, Professor Seagull, had been a Greenwich Village landmark before World War II. He had spent his life in downtown cafeterias, diners, barrooms, and hobo jungles, tormented by ‘the three H’s – homelessness, hunger, and hangovers’ – and compiling An Oral History of Our Time.

  According to Joseph Mitchell, who wrote Gould up in The New Yorker, he wrote in school-composition books and filled them with ‘a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay.’ In one chapter alone, ‘The Good Men Are Dying Like Flies’: ‘Gould begins a biography of a diner proprietor
and horse-race gambler named Side-Bet Benny Altschuler, who stuck a rusty icepick in his hand and died of lockjaw; and skips after a few paragraphs to a story a seaman told him about seeing a group of tipsy lepers on a beach in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad; and goes from that to an anecdote about a meeting held in Boston in 1915 to protest against the showing of The Birth of a Nation, at which he kicked a policeman; and goes from that to a description of a trip he once made through the Central Islip insane asylum, in the course of which a woman pointed to him and screamed, “There he is! Thief! Thief! There’s the man that picked my geraniums and stole my mamma’s mule and buggy”; and goes from that to an account an old stumble-bum gave of glimpsing and feeling the blue-black flames of hell one night while sitting in a doorway on Great Jones Street and of seeing two mermaids playing in the East River just north of Fulton Fish Market later the same night; and goes from that to an explanation made by a priest of old St Patrick’s Cathedral on Mott Street of why Italian women are addicted to the wearing of black; and then returns at last to Side-Bet Benny, the lockjawed diner proprietor.’

  This description was the closest that Davitt or anybody now living had ever got to glimpsing the original. An Oral History was never published. There was a fire someplace, all the composition books burned up, and then Gould died. Or maybe the order was different. Whatever, the story never hit the stands: ‘But he wrote it, didn’t he?’ said Davitt. ‘He sat, he saw, he wrote.’

  Sight unseen, Joe Gould’s book had still changed Davitt’s existence; inspired him to News on the Rialto. He understood that he lacked Professor Seagull’s universality. His own canvas was restricted to Union Square. Still, he didn’t see this as a limitation. Far from it. By chronicling this one spot in every detail, through the tales of its inhabitants, ancient and infant, forever and just passing through, he hoped to achieve a synopsis of all humankind: ‘The Cosmos in Cliff Notes,’ he said.

  So far he had written some two million words. Completed notebooks, handwritten in a minuscule schoolgirl script, filled an entire sea chest. Still his task was just begun.

  He had not lost faith. He still believed in his vision, more intensely than he’d ever done. But he was paralyzed by shyness. He could approach no stranger, couldn’t manage the lightest small talk. Every day the newspaper vendor said ‘Have a nice day,’ and each day Davitt meant to respond. He never did.

  I myself had only met him by running into his mother, Eugenia, while she was wheeling through her corner deli. She wanted Blue Mountain coffee; I possessed the last jar; we traded for her son. Even then it had taken four letters, maybe a dozen phone calls, before he would speak out loud.

  Every day of these last eighteen years, he had followed the same ritual. Rising at six, he wrote for exactly three hours. Then he took breakfast with his mother; then he rode his bike three blocks to Union Square. The bicycle was a vintage Rudge from Wolverhampton, England, high-barred and erect, a thoroughbred. Old friends of his mother’s, cigar makers, let him stash it in their hallway. When he picked it up at night, the saddle smelled faintly of Cuban seeds, rolled Dominican leaf.

  And then what? ‘I take notes. I amble,’ Davitt said. ‘I think the big thoughts.’

  Most of the time, he sat on park benches, working up his courage to approach some stranger and start intercourse. Courage never came. So he settled for the next best thing: ‘I watch. I imagine. I lie.’

  The Union Square we sat in this day was all of bits and pieces. On the east was the Farmer’s Market, organic, pure; to the south were Tommy Blalock’s T-shirts; to the west, juveniles and winos. Before us were statues of liberty (assorted) – Lafayette, Lincoln, and Gandhi – and the equestrian George Washington, eyes filthy and right arm beckoning, with a look of promiscuous entreaty, like some Bourbon Street tout crying ‘Live! Naked! Live! They’re naked and they dance!’

  ‘You have to understand,’ David said. But he did not say what. In conversation, his style was to sneak up on a subject, make a sudden dart, then dash back to shelter. ‘It’s hard to say,’ he said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Everything.’

  His voice was breathless, very small. Bound rigid by the tightness of his sweater and lime-green pants, he sat flinching in the shadow of Washington’s horse. A massively built charger with a rump like rolling thunder, it gazed down askance, one hoof raised and pawing. ‘Cream rises, scum sinks,’ Dr Davitt said, and he led me inside Grace Church.

  It was the very best of Gothic Revival – vertical, strait, austere, with no stick or stone of empty rhetoric. Henry Holiday’s Pre-Raphaelite windows washed the nave in a cool twilit glow, as soothing as a cold compress. ‘This is loveliness,’ Davitt said.

  The fat girl at the altar said, ‘God is.’

  The other fat girl said, ‘Aren’t we all?’

  The spot was hallowed in Barnumania. Here, on February 10, 1863, General Tom Thumb was wed at last to his Lavinia Warren. Grace Church was then less than twenty years from consecration, but already it had surpassed Trinity in chic. ‘The First Temple of Christ Our Lord in Knickerbocker Society,’ a gossip columnist called it. Washington Square lay just to the south, Gramercy Park was sprouting to the north. Within a square mile, the whole of New York’s richest and finest were gathered, and Tom Thumb’s wedding had brought them all running.

  This was Barnum’s shining hour. So far he had made money, news, sensation. Now he made the Social Register. Two thousand guests were invited, and more than five thousand showed up. Among them were four state governors, thirteen army generals, untold rabbles of mayors and millionaires. President and Mrs Lincoln sent a gift of Chinese firescreens, and seats were scalped at sixty dollars per pew. ‘I know not what better I could have done,’ Barnum wrote, ‘had the wedding of a Prince been in contemplation.’

  Fittingly, Grace Church loomed over the corner of Tenth, Broadway’s elbow, where the streetcar bent the corner round. From its steps, you could face both ways at once, be in a straight line from Wall Street and also from Times Square. ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,’ said Dr Davitt. Across the street, a custom-made billiards store preened, its windows rich with mahoganies, gleaming oaks. ‘I just love dark woods,’ Davitt said.

  In the years of his observation, many superficials had changed. The secondhand bookstores that had dotted Fourth Avenue were gone, and the antique warehouses that recycled salvage now charged three thousand dollars for fake art nouveau Ganymedes. Instead of ninety-eight timepieces, the site of Korn’s Klock Korner now offered twenty-three styles of goat cheese.

  ‘Yuppies. Another despicable word,’ Davitt said. ‘What was wrong with Bourgeois Curs?’ On Union Square itself, post-Nouvelle hash-houses and Eurotrash ginmills scarred the sidewalks once sacred to dime-a-dance. In the whole square, you could buy no sliced white bread, only honey-raisin-in-cinnamon rolls, cream-cheese-almond croissants. ‘What does it make you?’ Dr Davitt said. He lit a fresh cigarette. ‘Sick,’ he said.

  The thought of an upscaled Fourteenth Street threatened him profoundly. All he asked was to grow old ungracefully, evolve into the style of curmudgeon that made children scream and run away just by smiling. You couldn’t do that with a mouth full of kiwi fruit.

  But he need not have worried. Beneath the New Age trappings, the square’s essence remained as shiftless as ever. High fashion might swank on the piazza, but along Fourteenth Street, the shops looked tacked together with Elmer’s Glue, the vendors changed with the seasons. ‘No tomorrows, let it all hang out, it’s now or never,’ said Tommy Blalock.

  ‘Have some Night Train,’ Lush Life said.

  He didn’t, she did. She had been nip-sipping all day, and now it began to show. Nelly Forbush’s green eyes were fuzzed; the boater wilted at tilt. ‘Normal as August, I am as Kansas as blueberry pie,’ she sang. ‘Heart too tart for the Fourth of July.’

  Her nerve was primed, her mind made up. On this afternoon, when trading was done, she would lug Tommy Blalock to the Arlington Hotel, Broadway at Twenty-fifth,
where they rented by the hour. In any room with a three or an eight, her birth numbers, she would take her best shot – no holds barred.

  Behind the ranks of Bart Simpson T-shirts, on the hoardings by the IRT, theater posters advertised a Bertolt Brecht revival. IN HER MOUTH LINGERS THE TASTE OF ANOTHER MAN, the caption read. But Lush Life swore it was not true. ‘You are my first,’ she said.

  ‘And only,’ said Tommy Blalock.

  It was a statement, not a question. Scooping up his T-shirts and army-surplus blanket, his profit and his love all in one formless bundle, he bore them off through traffic. Truck horns blared, Brooklyn voices cursed, but he never broke step. ‘Tommy Blalock,’ he said, ‘could give a fuck.’

  And Dr Davitt? ‘I could. But I don’t,’ he said. In the shadow of George Washington’s horse’s rump, which blotted out the sun, he hugged his notebook to him like a shield. ‘A place to disappear in,’ he said.

  Not for too much longer. His mother’s health was failing; they were planning to move to Cape Cod. In six months, perhaps a year, he’d be gone, and News on the Rialto would be out of time. After eighteen years, he did not regret that it wasn’t complete. But he did wish he’d dared to begin. ‘All of the people sitting. All the bodies, all the lives,’ he said. ‘I might have asked.’

  What he would miss most was the hopelessness, the sense of waste, and the echoes they struck in him. The square, he believed, was a seine for the foredoomed. ‘Streetsweepers of the soul,’ he called them. Across the piazza, Calvin Palmer still circled his broom, idly stirring a peck of pigeons. The sight stirred Davitt to pity, an existential rage. ‘Poor misbegotten bastard,’ he said. ‘What chance did he ever have?’

  Fourteen half-smoked menthol cigarettes were spread in a neat fan around his feet. Rising now, he picked them up one by one, carried them to a wastebasket. ‘Time for tea,’ he said. But before he went, he made a brief recitation. In a voice like a squeaky hinge, he read again from the first page of his life’s chronicle: ‘Where everything would end,’ he breathed. ‘It would be the flower forever. Only everything would not stop growing.’