The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  He lit a fresh cigarette; he sucked twice. ‘Blood in the Blender was better,’ he said.

  When Dr Davitt went home to his mother, I went back to the Hotel Moose. Face down among the marigolds, I tried to read more Struggles and Triumphs, but could not concentrate. Even the tale of Madame Josephine Fortune Clofullia, ‘the most astounding wonder of the nineteenth century,’ comely, feminine, with a ‘full-grown beard and whiskers that the most fastidious dandy would be proud to wear,’ failed to grip. Soon I slept.

  When Lush Life woke me, it was two in the morning, and Motion was watering his garden, singing No Woman No Cry up and down the corridor. Sugary rank wine ran down my face, in my mouth. I reached out blindly, but Lush Life was not to hand. ‘Well?’ I asked.

  ‘We are one,’ she said.

  16

  ‘Have you spoken with Satan lately?’ the quiet voice purred. ‘You know that he’s waiting your call.’

  The voice belonged to a man who called himself Smith; Archie Smith. A warm and beaming presence in a gray business suit and button-down Brooks Brothers shirt, he was standing outside the locked silver gates of the Palais de Beauté, a black-leather briefcase in hand. ‘Well, have you?’ he insisted.

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘You seem darkness friendly,’ he said.

  Chins juddering, fat paw outgrabbing, he looked like an encyclopedia salesman. And that, to hear him tell it, was just what he was. ‘The arcane knowledge of the ancients, the timeless volumes of forbidden lore. The black books,’ he said. ‘All lie within your grasp. Just reach out and claim them, they are yours.’

  ‘No money down?’

  ‘Not a cent.’ When he smiled, his red cheeks swelled up, his eyes almost vanished. His resemblance to Porky Pig was quite remarkable. ‘The Black Arts are not about lucre. They’re about belief. About trust,’ Archie said. ‘About potential for inner change and growth, and your willingness to explore them.’

  Opening up his briefcase, he displayed a wide range of portfolios stuffed with reading matter. Spoiled for choice, I vacillated. ‘Which would you recommend?’ I asked.

  ‘For beginners?’ He stroked invisible whiskers, seemed to pick out a pamphlet at random. ‘Satan: The Real Deal,’ he said. ‘Not flashy, but a good solid read, full of meat.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Just meat.’ He looked at me a little sideways, like a tailor measuring. ‘A feast for the hungry mind,’ he said.

  The vagueness was not by choice; just a needed self-defense. When first he’d taken his message to the streets, he had been too open: ‘I led with my heart, not my head, and I got hurt,’ he said. He shook his chins at the remembrance. ‘Some people, you know, they’re so prejudiced,’ he said. ‘They close their minds, tight like clams, and you just can’t get them to open up again. If you try, they turn sarcastic. Even threatening.’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘Worse. Far worse.’ The thought seemed to make him nervous. His cheeks subsided, his eyes reappeared, and this time they did not seem so jovial. ‘Perhaps I misread your signal. I thought you were a seeker,’ he said.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Yes. Well, yes.’ He snatched Satan: The Real Deal from my hand, then snapped his briefcase shut. Suddenly, he was twenty yards away. ‘Where could I find you again?’ I shouted out.

  For a moment he seemed to waver. His missionary self drew him back towards the potential convert. ‘Don’t worry,’ he called. But his prudent self was the stronger. ‘We’ll find you,’ Archie said.

  It was a Friday twilight, the streetlamps were just going on. Wall Street was out for the weekend and, minute by minute, the streets were filling with unleashed marketeers, hot for the new night’s spoils.

  Broadway between Union and Madison squares was their latest amusement park. Five years before, this had been nowhere in particular, a hiatus. It did have a few portentous buildings left over from the days of Ladies Mile, but most of their street levels were given over to wholesale toymen peddling carnival items – false beards and grab bags, whoopee cushions and carnation squirts. Now all that was overthrown. The toymen had been routed, their sites taken over by slicker, more expensive games. There were pool parlors and singles’ bars; Manhattan Raceway, a slotcar club; the Palais de Beauté, sacred to transvestites and arbitragers; and there was Cafe Society.

  ‘The room that defines the nineties,’ its night manager called it. If he was right, we were in for a schizoid ride. On weeknights, it was a tango palace. When you walked by its wraparound windows, you looked in upon a Busby Berkeley set. Floor-to-ceiling columns framed the dancers, superb in formal dress, who dipped and froze, spun and surged cheek to cheek. Soft lighting bathed them in pinks; through the windows, the music sounded tinny, a long way distant. The whole charade, self-consciously nostalgic, conjured up music boxes and mechanical ice dancers twirling.

  Then came Fridays. The live orchestra was banished, the lights turned electric rainbow. Three chained pedestals were placed inside the windows, and go-go girls placed upon the pedestals. When the music started blasting, it was Ride on Time and The Power, and two of the girls acted out a lesbian soft-porn routine. The blonde wore blue-denim cutoffs, thigh boots, and a see-through bra; the brunette, spandex and sequins. When the blonde lay down on her back, the brunette crouched low above her, grinding her crotch in her partner’s face. Then the brunette lay down beside her; they touched but they did not look.

  Macy’s window had nothing on this. Inside Cafe Society, the drinkers seemed only amused. But outdoors, shut out by the plate-glass windows, Broadway stopped dead. Police in their patrol cars, taxi drivers in their cabs, a hundred Bourgeois Curs – all stared transfixed. ‘Disgusting,’ said one suit.

  ‘Pigs,’ said another.

  ‘Disgusting pigs,’ said a third, which seemed to settle things. And all of them stared some more.

  When the first two girls, who were paid, had finished their routine, they were replaced by volunteers. Girls alone, girls and girls, girls and boys, they came bumping and strutting, mincing and twitching, black leathers and gold G-strings, bodystockings, scarlet ruffles, satin peek-a-boos. ‘Have you spoken to Satan lately?’ I heard Archie Smith saying, lost somewhere in the crush.

  ‘Sure, I called him up. He was engaged,’ a woman’s voice replied. ‘The asshole always is.’

  She stood a little aside, lolling against a streetlamp and dragging on a small cigar. Tall and lean, somewhere in her thirties, she was a woman in black.

  First impressions were grim. In studded, black biker’s jacket and black dancer’s tights, dyed black hair, bitten black fingernails, she looked like a Juliette Greco left too long in the oven. But she wore no shades, and her stare was direct, unstyled. ‘A drink wouldn’t hurt,’ she said.

  At the Old Town Tavern, she ordered a double orange juice, but she must have left her money in her other jacket and now she felt just awful, she truly did. The go-go girls had upset her. So had Satan’s salesman. ‘I hope he rots in hell,’ she said.

  ‘So does he.’

  ‘I suppose.’ But she was not appeased. She worked just round the corner, quality checking for a Japanese stuffed-panda importer, and these Real Dealers were getting her down. ‘If it was only one, I wouldn’t mind. But they’re everywhere,’ she grouched. ‘All of them dressed the same – business suits, shiny shoes. And all of them called Smith.’ She wolfed down her OJ, slapped her hand on the bar for another. ‘Arcane knowledge of the ancients. Inner change and growth. Or did you get the one about investment? Satan’s Stock Exchange?’ The rim of her glass was smeared black with lipstick. ‘The nerve of those guys,’ she said.

  Her name was Sadie; she was a recovering addict. ‘Smack, coke, booze, ludes, love,’ she said. Six nights a week, she went to meetings, and on the seventh she watched people in bars get loaded. ‘Have to do it. Just have to.’ She swiveled on her barstool, looked me over, as if I’d just sat down. ‘You ever been to a meeting?’ she asked.

  ‘One.’
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br />   ‘Hello, Sadie.’ Her face split in a simper. ‘Admit that you are powerless. Admit that a power greater than you can restore you to sanity. Humbly ask Him to remove your shortcomings.’ She shuddered theatrically, flathanded the bar one more time. ‘Rather Hell than Well,’ she said.

  The voice was rough. So was the skin. But the mouth, even propped up by a cigar, would not stay hard. Laugh lines and pain lines spread from its corners in a force field, like an ordinance survey map, minutely scaled, marked out in iron filings.

  Spotting them in the backbar mirror, she went rigid, she stared herself down, Travis Bickles in Taxi Driver. ‘You looking at me?’ she said. Ash from her chico fell into her drink, she laughed. ‘What a maroon,’ she said.

  The Old Town was a day bar; it shut down in the dark. Strolling back to Broadway, Sadie took my arm. Her black nails dug in like talons, gouging the weak flesh inside my elbow. The crowds were still milling outside Cafe Society. Now an olive-skin boy, stripped down to his jock, was being toyed with by a streaked blonde. Bending double to touch her toes, she pushed the crack of her ass up and out, straight into the watchers’ faces. But they had seen too much already, they did not even ripple. ‘Not a sausage. Not one solitary sausage,’ Sadie said. Away from bright lights, black-leathered and rock and roll skinny, she was a woman who could almost have passed for a girl.

  The evening throng overspilled the sidewalks. By Ralph Lauren out of Calvin Klein, they came stepping two by two, the doctors and the lawyers, the brokers and the bondsmen, each bearing their own set of trademarks.

  Sadie, who knew all this stuff, rang them up like walking closet-racks. ‘Omega Speedmasters,’ she said. ‘Bossini Challengers. Hermés Silk Twills.’ In the window of Cafe Society, the blonde knelt before the olive-skin boy, her wet, orange mouth three inches from his crotch, and pantomimed sucking. One fat cop, half-asleep, stepped from his prowl car and started to cross the street. ‘Yves St Laurent. Tommy Hilfiger. Yohji Yamamoto,’ Sadie chanted. The blonde waved to the cop, the cop chewed gum. ‘Noblia Moonphase Chronographs. Lancôme Exfoliating Gel Scrub.’ The cop spat out his gum, and the crowd drifted on. The olive-skin boy, eyes shut to show off his fine long lashes, popped a pimple on his butt. ‘Giorgio Brutini. Ronaldus Shamask,’ Sadie said. ‘Ozone Protective Layer.’

  A few yards down Broadway a Winnebago van pulled up outside Johnny Rockit, disgorging a joblot of transvestites. After midnight, they would be voguing at the Palais de Beauté, safe-sex titillation for the investment counsellors. They were the city’s new goddesses.

  Among them was Denise Denise, Lush Life’s friend. ‘We came a long way from St Louis,’ she said. Five years before, she and most of these other bodies had been hiding out in Harlem, at Andre’s on 125th Street. It was New York’s oldest gay bar, a safehouse in all troubled times. And those times were troubled indeed. Gay bashing was in open season, and transvestites, dressers, its prime targets. Denise Denise had been beaten up four times in one winter: ‘Not just trashed. Hospital stuff,’ she said. ‘Broken ribs, busted teeth. A boot in the throat.’ So she had holed up inside Andre’s. ‘Just me, my pussy, and five hundred close personal friends.’ And there, she and her friends together, they had created vogue.

  ‘Defiance, I guess. Or just self-defense,’ said Denise Denise. In repose, a deep purplish brown, she was tall and stately, austere as a fashion plate. But her voice was a squeal of brakes, tires burning rubber in the third turn at Indy. ‘Disco throat,’ she said. ‘A case of dance or die.’

  Andre’s was not easy to describe; harder yet to explain. ‘Feets fail me,’ she said. All those wintry Harlem nights, the wind a witch up and down 125th Street, and the wolfpacks waiting to pounce. And inside Andre’s, sanctuary. ‘Such beautiful boys and girls. Such lovely things,’ said Denise Denise. ‘You’d hit your spot, strike your pose, and everything would just go zwooosh, vzooom. You had so much time, all the space you’d ever need, it was almost like you were tripping. Of course, some nights you were tripping.’ She hit a Valentino pose, long and languid, a weeping willow. Then she switched to a veiled mystery, after Coco Chanel. ‘Dance or die,’ she said. ‘I danced.’

  Voguing had spread from Andre’s to other clubs, from dressers to the whole Other world. In due course, its moment done, it went out of style. Soon after that, the news had reached Madonna, and she’d turned it into a video. Suddenly, Vogue was a national craze: ‘All-American as a blow job,’ said Denise Denise. And dressers were downtown divas.

  Georgette and Lyzy, Perfidia, Vanessa the Undresser, Cherry Sunday – not since Harlow and Andy Warhol’s Superstars, way back in the late sixties, had TVs been so hot. No fashion show or dance club was copacetic without them, no night crawl complete. ‘Divinities,’ said Denise Denise.

  Playing Broadway, she struck random poses. Surrounded by Armanis and Gianni Versaces, politely gawking, she twisted herself like a corkscrew, then stood on one leg, a flamingo. ‘My pussy’s frozen,’ she announced. The strollers slowed. Somebody clapped, someone else called her name. Denise Denise spread herself, splayed and crawly, a crab, and began a vogued rendition of ‘Cool Water,’ the fifties Western hit by the Sons of the Pioneers. ‘All day I face the barren waste,’ she chanted, a halfway Rap, ‘in search of torture. Cruel, cruel torture.’

  Through all of this, Sadie had stood off by herself, saying and showing nothing. Now she loomed back to collect me. As if reclaiming a stray mutt, she yanked me by my shoulder, dragged me off down the street. Her hardscrabble face, exposed to direct light, looked old beyond age; the pulse in her throat kept jumping like a trapped bird thrashing blindly. ‘It happens,’ she said. She hid herself in a doorway, laid her forehead against the cool stone wall. ‘You should be home,’ I said.

  ‘Jesus God,’ she said, ‘the dumb male things you say.’

  ‘I am a dumb male.’

  ‘Dumb, anyway.’ She started to walk away, stiff-legged. Then she realized she had left her purse, came shuffling back. Another Winnebago pulled in, another truckload of goddesses tumbled out. ‘Jesus God,’ said Sadie again. Her black nails went scrabbling in the dark; she fished out a half-smoked cigar. ‘See you in the morning,’ she said. Her cheek was soot-smudged from the stone; she brushed my mouth with her own. ‘Sleep tight,’ she said.

  Next day came up tepid. ‘Seasonably mild under partly cloudy skies,’ the weatherman said. But it felt and tasted like last week’s bird’s-nest soup. Sadie’s meeting was somewhere in the West Twenties, where she lived. Afterwards, we kept a date in Madison Square.

  This was the most imposing of all Broadway’s gardens, felt almost like a park. Before the Civil War, it had been a staging post on the Bloomingale Road, ringed by the country estates of the Empire State elite, and it had never quite shed their imprint. ‘Privilege, proportion, and a sense of the fitness of things,’ one nineteenth-century guidebook had said, greasing the landed gentry. A hundred years on, the privileged were Metropolitan Life and Santa’s World. Still, the proportions had held up fine. It was the gentry that did not look so well.

  Nod Acres was the streetname. Junkies were woodland creatures, automatically drawn to all parks and playgrounds; and Madison Square was both. Its size and depth gave it privacy, its fine trees camouflage: ‘And then,’ Sadie said, ‘there is the southeastern exposure.’

  ‘Oh, the arbors! Oh, the bosky dells!’ the old guidebook had marveled. And oh, the used hypodermics. Pram-pushing matrons, taking the morning air, now time-shared their benches with smack and crack, angel dust, delaudids, moon-rock. From time to time, the law paid a token visit, hauled off a few bodies at random. Then it went away again, and nothing material was changed.

  From one angle, this was no great leap. The square had been created expressly to celebrate pleasures; dope was simply pleasure’s new form.

  To begin with, it had been open grasslands used for hunting, military training, and young bloods’ gallops. Downtown fashionables used to ride out in their carriages to shed the city, take their ease over
long rustic lunches. But Broadway would not be cast off so lightly; it caught them up over cigars and brandies.

  As ever, Phineas T. Barnum led the charge. At Fourth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street stood Union Depot, the sheds of Commodore Vanderbilt’s New York Central and Harlem Railroad. After the Civil War, as the area turned chic, Vanderbilt moved the sleeping trains uptown, and their sheds lay empty. In 1874, Barnum took them over and transformed them into his Great Roman Hippodrome. Seven years later, the Hippodrome became the first Madison Square Garden, presenting the Barnum and London Circus.

  Its opening, heralded by a mammoth torchlight parade up Broadway, was the most splendiferous of the showman’s whole career: ‘A half million people, many paying from five to ten dollars for views from windows, stood dazzled by the golden chariots and tableau cars, some drawn by teams of zebras and deer, the barred cages of leopards and hyenas, the glassed wagons of serpents, the 338 horses, 20 elephants, 14 camels, and the 370 costumed circus performers who marched past in review. Then followed General Tom Thumb and Lavinia, the 8-foot Chinese giant named Chang-Yu Sing, the baby elephant Barnum had once tried to buy from Bailey, the harnessed giraffes, the bareback riders, the wire-rope walkers, the daredevil trapeze artists, the drilling elephants, the Japanese jugglers.’

  It was Barnum’s crowning fantasia; in essence, his last. Afterwards, he spent more and more time with his family and estate in Connecticut, and there in 1891, aged eighty, he expired.

  His work was done, and well done. A line of succession – Tony Pastor and Oscar Hammerstein I, Ziegfeld, Frohman, and Ringling – was already rising up behind him. Madison Square was the Garden of Earthly Delights. And Broadway was launched on its Gilded Age.