The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  ‘Now about my first husband. I met him in my line of work. No, not that line of work. (Bump; big wink.) I was a cigarette girl at a club on Fifty-second Street – I’d like to tell you the club’s name but I don’t dare, today it’s such a famous place, the owners might sue me. But it was Twenty-one. That’s right, Jack and Charlie’s Twenty-one Club. Well, in those days Fifty-second was the greatest night-club street in New York City, in America even, the world. They used to call it the Street That Never Sleeps, and all the great jazz musicians of that long-ago era, like Duke Ellington and Count Basie, Benny Goodman and Miss Billie Holiday, they all used to play and party there. The whole street was a blaze of lights from dusk to dawn, with beautiful music, oh such beautiful music, pouring out from every open door, the Three Deuces and the Onyx, Jimmy Ryan’s, Leon & Eddie’s; you’d think you must of died and gone to heaven. And there I was, little me, actually not so little, I’d filled out very nicely, thank you, even though I do say so myself. (Strike pose. Laugh.) Selling cigarettes in fishnet stockings and tails, with a white gardenia in my buttonhole, a boutonniere they call it, très chic ma chérie. That’s Popsy in French. And one night my husband comes in. Of course, he wasn’t my husband then; he was a total stranger. But he comes in anyhow, and he takes one look at me, our eyes meet, and how could you put it in words, it’s love at first sight, that old black magic, it’s like a Spanish earthquake or is that Sicilian, I always forget. (Look dumb but adorable.) Well, he doesn’t just buy a pack of cigarettes, he buys the whole trayload and fills up all his pockets, he’s bulging out like a Santa Claus, smokes are spilling all over the place, and so is my heart, believe me. Hubba hubba. So when I come off work, we cross the street to Mammy’s Chicken Koop – they had just the greatest fried chicken then, Southern-style, all spicy and crisp. Like me. (Laugh.) And my husband’s name is Jerry, he tells me he’s from the Coast – Santa Clara – and he’s in the insurance business actually. But I don’t hear two words together, I’m so that way. I tell you, we just ate up all that chicken, and then we drove down to Atlantic City in the dawn, took our blood tests, and we were married the very next day. That’s how hot we were. Hotter than a pepper sprout. (Laugh. Sigh. Stretch like cat.) We had our honeymoon in Pompton Lakes, up in the mountains, just a simple log cabin with a blazing fire and lots to drink, not much to eat but who needed food, we had our love. Such a love. It was my first, and they say you never forget your first. And it’s true, believe me, you never do. (Sing.) When they begin the beguine, it brings back the sound of music so tender, it brings back a night of tropical splendor. (Stop sing.) Four days and nights of bliss. What moments divine, what raptures serene. And on the fifth day the feds came. Yes, you heard me right, the Untouchables. We were woken from our dream of love by the sound of a bullhorn and a man’s voice yelling, “Come on out with your hands up. We have you surrounded. You don’t have a prayer. Come on out.” And then the gunfire started. And Jerry died in a hail of bullets. My husband of five days. They filled him full of lead.’

  Her voice had grown hoarse, begun to crack. Dropping another curtsy, she came back to the bar and drank two full glasses of ice water. ‘Why did they shoot him?’ I asked.

  ‘They had no heart,’ said Roz, and went back to work again. Three steps left she paced, then three steps right, up and back, up and back, over and over and over. ‘They filled him full of lead,’ she said. ‘He was my first, and you never forget your first. But a winner never quits, and a quitter never wins. Nobody does actually, but that’s another story. So then I came back to good old Times Square. (Sing.) Come on along and listen to, the Lullaby of Broadway. The hip hooray and ballyhoo, the Lullaby of Broadway. (Stop sing.) And oh, it was so gorgeous then, it was just everything. These days all the shops are locked up behind those iron gates, they look like prison bars. But it was so gorgeous then. And so was I. (Bump. Girlish squeal.) I went to work for the great Mr Roxy Rothafel at his fabulous Roxy Theater, right here on Seventh Avenue, they used to call it the Cathedral of the Motion Picture, but movies were just one part of it; they also had the Mighty Wurlitzer and Louis Something furnishings in the ladies’ rooms. They gave you a free bar of soap with every handwash, and a thousand stars of stage and screen, and of course the fabulous Rockettes. That was me. (Four highkicks and a split.)

  ‘Now about my second husband. He was just the opposite of Number One, a very quiet man, neat and clean in all his habits; you never saw a soiled shirt on him. Never mind a bullethole. (Laugh.) He was a movie projectionist at Loews New York; you could say he was in show business too, so that gave us something in common right away. We met at Child’s, and he just swept me off my feet. A regular Don Juan. Even if he was bald and kind of stumpy. And we had twenty-three years of rapture. Oh, words could not express it – he was the world to me, the sun and stars and the moon at night, my mother and father and lover and brother. (Sing.) Night and day, deep in the heart of me. (Stop sing.) And then he died. It was our anniversary, number twenty-three, and we went to Sardi’s for dinner, the same way we did every year. My husband – his name was Hubert – he toasted me in a martini, bone-dry, the way he always liked it. And then he choked on the olive. He coughed and looked at me kind of funny, and then he just fell down across the table. The glasses and the flowers, and oh, all the lovely food were scattered everywhere. And that was that. Heart attack. Right before my eyes. And that was that.’

  Out on the floor, the lights went blue, green, purple, pink, and the couples danced cheek to cheek. Roz drank down two more glasses of ice water, then she ordered a double gin and tonic and drank that down as well. ‘So what do you think so far?’ she asked.

  ‘“Begin the Beguine,”’ I said. ‘I always loved that song.’

  ‘I told you I brought joy.’

  Three steps to the left, then back. Three steps to the right, then back. ‘And that was that,’ she said. ‘And oh, I was just devastated. I thought my life was over, you might as well plough me under. But a poet once said, “Time is the root of all evil.” So I pulled myself off the floor. I said to myself, Roz, I said, when skies are cloudy and gray, they’re only gray for a day, I said, so wrap your troubles in dreams, and dream all your troubles away. (Beat.) I have been dreaming ever since.

  ‘Now about my third husband –’

  Outdoors, the duststorm swirled unabated, and every block back to the Deuce was a battle hard won. At Father Duffy Square, a twenty-foot red banner said COME AND MEET THOSE DANCING FEET. Directly beneath it, I paid a dollar for a soiled green pamphlet copyright 1985. Evils of the Elders, it was called. AIDS, Sex, Sin and Worse Things to Come.

  The author was Ray Crabtree.

  In the blurb at the back, he was described as ‘a long time impresario, a humanitarian who for many years helped the poor in selling them first-class clothing to wear especially in seeking jobs, at very little or no cost.’

  His words were words of flame.

  The argument of Evils of the Elders was tortuous, the basic point stark. Modern Man was bad, Woman worse: ‘These women’s lib has simply joined the tyrannical rot of men,’ Crabtree wrote. ‘Let’s take a look at the things they term liberation, orgies galore, swap parties, abortion, drugs, sex in the schools, gay rights, almost all persons in NYC is gay one way or the other they are doing the same thing, the mouth work. One just have to walk through the streets nightly and will see heads going up and down sucking on lollipops and mushrooms I guess… . Watch out miss thing they are stealing and messing up the trade mark.’

  The pamphlets were being sold out of an orange crate by Ramon, a fourteen-year-old boy. He said he’d found them, he couldn’t remember where, but he knew where the author lived: ‘Everybody knows where that man’s at. He abide in the spirit house.’

  According to Evils of the Elders, he was not alone. ‘This writer lives with cats, dogs and birds so that they may warn and protect him when the plague comes around the house. We live in the dark and are able to see many things and to think. There are peace in the dark als
o.’ Still, like all creatures who meant no harm, they lived under constant threat. Evil and foulness swirled everywhere about them, only waiting the chance to strike. ‘Today this plague is in the form of humans but when they go monster they will be much dangerous. It will not be war weapons necessarily that will devour mankind, it will be human bums, vampires, werewolves and fangs. Yes, the time of the ugly has arrived.’

  In the section of Hell’s Kitchen that realtors now called Clinton, Ray Crabtree’s home stood facing DeWitt Clinton Park, infamous for crack and murder one. It was a white house behind a black fence, badly fire-scarred, with boarded-up windows; it had a vaguely Southern look, a whiff of boondocks and poke salad. A supermarket shopping cart was chained to the gate. Many dogs howled unseen.

  Crabtree did not emerge in haste. It took an hour of knocking and calling, sticking messages through the fence. When at last he ventured forth, he was a black man in his sixties, robust in a patched red sweater. His features were high-boned, fine. He spoke without prompting. ‘I knew you was coming. I was informed,’ he said.

  ‘Warned?’

  ‘Let’s just say apprised.’

  He could not invite visitors inside the house. It was not tidied up; there were too many animals. Three years before, some firebugs had tried to burn him out. The roof had been ruined, the windows blown out, the whole interior trashed. But that was not the worst: ‘All my dogs burned up,’ Crabtree said.

  In person, he was gently spoken, a man of conscious dignity. Ruminant, his voice was pitched like a stringed instrument, all swoops and scurries, pizzicato stabs, sudden leaps: ‘The violin. The fiddle,’ he said. ‘It was my first wife.’

  They’d met when he was in grade school, growing up near Okmulgee, Oklahoma. He was the fifth of thirteen children, the son of a sharecropper. Seeing Ingrid Bergman in Intermezzo at the local movie house, he fell in love, bought a fiddle secondhand, and joined a local band: ‘I even took lessons. It was my destiny. But it didn’t work out,’ he said. So he left home, made his way to Tulsa, then New York. He walked the streets, found out where money went, and followed it. For weeks and months, he sat in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria, the Pierre, talking to any man or woman who did not spurn him. He was nineteen years old, an Aries, ‘the Ram, bold and brazen, not scared of anything or nothing.’ He knew that he had been elected.

  It was 1942. For ten years, he studied composition, read, and practiced philosophy. His models were Aristotle and Spinoza, Voltaire, Wagner and Rasputin, the greatest man of the twentieth century, the most misunderstood. He wrote two operas, one of them complete, and songs, trios, quartets. He would have joined the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, only he could not dance: ‘So I went on with my reading. And it was like magic, everything I read, it was in me already, I knew it before, only I didn’t know what it was,’ he said. ‘Its right name.’

  Knowing its name, he was fully armed. And again he went where the money went: ‘For Solomon says that the feast is made for laughter, wine for making merry, but money answers all things.’ Finding backers, he put on concerts at the Town Hall, the Carnegie Recital Hall. In program notes, he wrote that he was ‘attempting to add to the ineversal thought.’ His compositions included The Senses – Inspirations from the Readings of Nietzsche, The Will Is Everything, and the Crabtree Violin Concerto.

  ‘There was more. Always more,’ he said. Beyond himself, he promoted ballroom dancing and jazz, performers like Noble Sissle, Eubie Blake, and Hazel Scott, and he had his own radio program, Crabtree’s Youth Show. More gainful, he sold used clothes. He never married; he had no intimates; he lived in one room off Madison Avenue. Around 1960, he began to accumulate spare dogs. ‘Historically wise, this was the turning point,’ he believed. ‘When my bitch, she littered nine pups, I put them in my bathroom – it was a good-size bathroom, a shower and all – but the neighbors, they complained and then I was put outdoors, outcast, and my dogs too.’

  Since then, he had moved many times. Sometimes, it seemed, he’d been moving on forever. But he had supporters, loyal friends; they did not let him starve. In 1974, he published his first book, View of Life and Things. Privately printed, it was subtitled The Message That Created Watergate, a collection of prophecies, dreams, meditations, and sold some three hundred copies. On the back cover was engraved the Crabtree crest – a hand erect holding a dagger in pale proper, argent a cross ragulé, sable a chief azure.

  On Eleventh Avenue, he and his dogs took shelter in an abandoned rail-freight office. There he sold more used clothes, read more books; he promoted Saturday night dances in a loading dock, which he rechristened the Ballroom. Then the city tore down the freight yard, turned it into the Jacob Javits Convention Center, a $375 million complex of glass and mirrors and steel. ‘I just wanted to make dreams come to reality,’ Crabtree told the New York Times. ‘I didn’t know anything else.’

  So he had come to DeWitt Clinton Park. The firebugs crept in the night, and all his dogs burned up. ‘But that’s to be expected,’ he said. ‘In the olden days, they killed all my kinds of people. Seers, prophets, and philosophers. John the Baptist and such.’ But that knowledge did not daunt him. ‘These people forget one thing,’ he said. ‘I am an Aries.’

  He did not thrive, he got by. Twice a week, he toured the neighborhood restaurants; they gave him plenty bones for the dogs and prime meat for himself. The rest of the time, he studied eternity. ‘Only one thing is certain,’ he pronounced. ‘We’re headed for the Fall.’

  Outside his white house, he stood against the wind and scratched his skull, a gentle man but lost. ‘Used to be, I dreamed most every night,’ he said. ‘I saw bright lights across my eyes. I was walking, not running, I was walking from my enemies. I was falling off a cliff; I dreamed music. I was floating. I dreamed mid-air.’ Behind the boarded windows, the dogs did not stop howling. ‘These days I don’t dream nothing,’ Ray Crabtree said.

  ‘Not ever?’

  ‘No nothing. No more.’

  Hearing this, Richard H. Roffman pursed his lips, shook his head. ‘Of course, even humanitarians have their down days,’ he said, doubtfully.

  Roffman was Crabtree’s press agent. He was also mayor of Times Square, self-styled, and the patron saint of quirks. His weekly cable TV show, The Dick Roffman World, had given a free platform to more stateless talents than any Broadway promoter since P. T. Barnum himself. Crabtree apart, his current roster included Monde, Genie of the Accordion and inventor of the world-famous celebrity handshake glove; Tino Valenti, Society Troubadour, and Adonaiasis, Singing Psychic; Morris Katz, the world’s fastest painter; Dr Joseph Yellis, podiatrist-humorist; and Dee Dee Darnell, Songthrush Who Needs No Introduction.

  This was no gag. A large round personage of the Humpty Dumpty persuasion, Roffman was a born missionary. If he didn’t believe in all of his clients’ talents, he believed devoutly in their right to a public airing. ‘The Pied Piper of Broadway,’ Wambly Bald, Valued friend, Close confidant, called him. ‘Where seldom is heard an encouraging word, his voice is the voice of bright lights.’

  Roffman himself had no such pretensions. ‘I am just a flack. The Woolworth of publicity, not the Tiffany,’ he said. Eggshell bald beneath an artist’s beret, which he wore rakishly aslant, he had trouble catching his breath. In his seventies, he was racked by arthritis and hernias, leaned heavily on a cane. But he did not abate his pace. In the last year, he had worked 365 days, attended twelve hundred gala functions, put out some seven thousand publicity releases. ‘My job is to hold out hope. This requires stamina,’ he said.

  Among the PR releases, tapped out with two fingers at a vintage Royal, were small masterworks: ‘The Whirling Dervish Society presented an award to Tino Valenti, the society troubadour, raconteur, character actor, artist, fashion designer, singer, guitarist, bicyclist, lecturer, producer, director for being the Busiest Man of Quality Around.’

  Or again: ‘Six vegetarian Dachshunds are available for placement by noted singing psychic Adonaiasis. At a press confe
rence held at the Lotos Eaters Chinese Restaurant, Adonaiasis, a tall, handsome, blond man of muscular physique said: “I sadly must give up these wonderful dogs, for I am getting so very busy with my consultation and personal advisory services and can only find time to give personal attention to a very few loved ones of the canine world… .”’

  In return for such inspirations, Roffman was rewarded much mockery, few thanks. For forty years, he had been working out of the same office/living room off Upper Broadway. Painted baby-pink, it was piled ceiling-high with publicity glossies, press clippings, demonstration tapes. Somewhere in the middle, propped up by his sister Malvina, Roffman sat talking on two phones at once, typing fresh releases. His great moon head gleamed stark-white with pain, a sweating cheese. Still he did not skip a beat: ‘Nat Lehrfeld, Furrier and Seashell Sculptor,’ he said. ‘Big Eddie Carmel, Gentle Nine-foot Jewish Giant from the Bronx. Princess Saint Joan, Noted Painter in Oils.’

  ‘Your pills,’ his sister Malvina said.

  ‘Brother Ignatius, holistic health guru who swears by the miraculous healing powers of the common coconut. Cowboy Jack Willis, Prizefighter and Poet. Harold Blum, Cookie Wholesaler.’

  ‘Oh, Dick. Oh, Dick,’ Malvina cried, wailing now. ‘What did the doctor tell you?’

  ‘Ugly George Urban,’ said Dick. ‘Wears silver suit.’

  He averaged twenty puffs and a hundred calls each day. Then the night shift began. ‘After my divorce, I swore I would never spend another night of my life at home. I never have,’ he said.