The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  Nothing changed. In Spartanburg, when the big house filled with family, he’d gone out in the yard and wrung chickens’ necks; on Broadway, he hid in Barrymore’s and wrung his own. He punished himself with cognac, so long and hard that his heart went bad. Sometime later, he found himself in detox, strapped down to a steel-frame bed.

  ‘I figured I made my point. Whatever it was,’ he said now. At the bar, he was toasting three years sober. Work, which had grown scarce, was trickling back again. He had just finished one show, was about to direct another. The Met was staging a revival of Porgy and Bess. There was his new club act to rehearse. Come the fall, there would be Europe: ‘The Larry Marshall Story,’ he said, ‘coming to a cinema near you.’

  Out of Barrymore’s, we strolled east towards Broadway. The theaters were just emptying, the crowds scuttling for safety. Years before, a leisurely post-curtain stroll had been integral to every Broadway night out. ‘Times Square was code for pleasure,’ Larry said. Now it stood for fear.

  ‘Strange,’ Larry said. If there was one thing that Broadway could not abide, it was Broadway, and vice versa. Everywhere outside New York, theater and street were synonymous. On the spot, they were mutual poison.

  The feud had its roots in the twenties. When the motion-picture palaces hit Times Square, theaters had been shunted off into side streets. The Gaiety and the Globe were swept aside by the Paramount and the Roxy. Then came the night clubs and dance halls – Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe and Sally Rand’s fan dance at the Paradise, the International Casino, the Palais Royal. Times Square turned honky-tonk, and the insult was never forgotten. ‘The ingrate unwashed,’ John Barrymore called the rabble. ‘A bunch of pinko twinkle-toes,’ Izzy Grove called the Stage.

  On Times Square this night, the crowds walked stooped and crooked, knocked crabwise by the windstorm. The blast had held steady all day; still the multitudes swarmed. As midnight neared, the howling seemed to grow hotter, more intense. Venturing out into Broadway, we found ourselves picked up bodily, hurled back where we came from. A palmist, a young black girl wrapped in shawls, grabbed my arm. ‘I save you,’ she said. Her name was Irish Eyes. ‘You have a deadly enemy. He plot your damnation,’ she said.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Check your fatty tissues.’

  Larry took shelter in a cinema doorway. The current attraction was Make Them Die Slowly, an everyday story of cannibal folk, and key scenes were flashed on a TV screen. Even as we tuned in, a victim was being devoured alive, up close and personal. One diner gnawed on an arm, another chomped on toes. In bloodsoaked close-up, the cold buffet rolled his eyes. Then one of the eyes disappeared. ‘Don’t say it,’ Larry begged. But he could not help himself. ‘It could have been me,’ he said.

  Alone again, I trekked back to Jimmy’s Corner. Sasha was sitting by the window, drawing moustachios on a picture of Gorbachev; but the Mad Monk Rasputin had vanished. ‘Was not all is cracked up to be,’ Sasha said. He scratched the itch where the beard had been. Then he flashed the day’s take. ‘Eight dollars and forty-three cents,’ he said. ‘Is to make mad any monk.’

  Down on the Deuce, the last civilians were in retreat. Senior citizens from Queens and Staten Island, they’d come to catch the second-run Hollywood features at the Lyric, the Selwyn, the Empire, the same palaces they had haunted in their teens.

  In the Grand Luncheonette, an antique Tin Man called Arnold held hands with Mamie, his bride of fifty-eight years. ‘I had my first orgasm in the Selwyn,’ he confided.

  ‘The Apollo,’ Mamie said.

  ‘No, dear,’ said Arnold. ‘The Selwyn.’

  ‘How could I forget?’ Mamie said. ‘Red Dust with Gable and Harlow, Mary Astor as the wife who strays. The tropical typhoon. The malaria, the heat. The second balcony.’

  ‘No, dear,’ said Arnold. ‘Camille.’

  When midnight struck, they were gone. Then the strip was left to the lifers. The Hotel Carter, where Rashan and his mother had lived on welfare, now catered to tourists again. Still its doorway was thick with peddlers; touts of every stripe. Check it out, check it out, the dealers cried. Fresh pussy, the pimps replied.

  I thought of the passage in Proust where the Narrator lies abed for forty pages and listens to the cries of the morning’s street vendors, weaving a choral symphony. Crack, smack, mescaline, the dealers rumbled. Cherry, cherry, the chickens chirped.

  Sweet young pussy. Get your pussy right here.

  Check it out, check it out.

  Positively no positives.

  Enemas. Golden showers. Black gold.

  Moonrock. Angel Dust.

  Cherry, cherry.

  Check it out.

  Through the lobby, on West Forty-third, we sought a drink at the Rose Saigon, but the doorman turned us away. No Caucasians were admitted. So we slid up the block to Sally’s Hideaway.

  Denise Denise was at the bar, toasting Lush Life’s departure. ‘All the best to the bitch. I take off my wig to her,’ she said, and she did. Underneath was a mess of stubble, a blighted cornfield. ‘I did it to myself. Tried to take out the kinks with lye, and I burned up all my roots,’ said Denise Denise. Her eyes filled with mist. ‘I was only sixteen. A teenage dream,’ she said.

  ‘A homecoming queen,’ the bar person supplied.

  ‘And bald as Chicken Little.’

  The room was full of bad girls. They dressed like the girls that their mothers had once told them to avoid: black micro-skirts and leather jackets, six-inch heels, slit dresses and push-up bras. On a tiny stage like a Murphy bed, a lady in red sat painting her fingernails. Electrifying Grace, she said her name was. ‘Wanna see my pussy?’ she inquired.

  ‘How much?’ Sasha asked.

  ‘I don’t got it with me tonight,’ said Grace. ‘It’s on order, though. Should be in any day.’

  Across the street were the loading bays for the New York Times. From Sally’s doorway, we could rerun the opening shots of The Sweet Smell of Success, unchanged after four decades: the blaze of lights in the dark street, the backlit shadows blown huge; the great trucks idling in their stalls; the bound bales of newsprint tumbling down the chutes, and the sudden roar of engines. ‘Cookie full of arsenic. Boy with ice-cream face,’ Sasha said. ‘Gotovy na Zastchitzu Zhop?’

  ‘Vsegda gotovy,’ I replied.

  Times Square had begun to empty. The fast-food joints were closing, the last troupe of Japanese businessmen heading back to their hotels. Outside Godfather’s Pizza, a black man begged in a brown derby hat. ‘Buddy, can you spare a dime? Or any multiple thereof?’ he asked. His smile was sheepish, self-mocking. ‘The line is old, I know,’ he said. ‘Then again, so am I.’

  So was anyone past twenty. When whites and tourists abandoned the square, sonic youth remained. Black and Hispanic, Korean, Chinese, it ran in ratpacks, ravaging the sidewalks, noise-raping the arcades. Inside Playland, Pac Man warred with Operation Wolf, The Temple of Doom with Stealth. Machine guns and missiles, rocket blasts, exploding mines kept up a nonstop fusillade. Ghetto blasters pumped a dozen clashing raps. But Public Enemy triumphed over all. ‘Subject of suckers, object of hate, who’s the one some think is great?’ Chuck D roared out. ‘I am that one –’

  ‘Lies, all lies,’ purred Barkley, a three-card monte man. ‘I am that one myself.’

  He was a wisp of a man, blue-black, with a smudge of goatee, a red shirt printed with green parakeets, and fingers like long, fleshless tendrils, trailing. Youths clustered round his cardboard box like first graders round a Good Humor man; could not wait to thrust cash on him. ‘Softly, softly,’ Barkley said. ‘The greatest assassin of life is haste.’

  Slydini would have loved his touch. His hands, as they moved the cards, were so fleet that the cards seemed to move themselves. Crack-spined and curling, they turned into the nine of clubs, the seven of spades, but never the queen of diamonds. ‘Don’t mope, don’t grope. Find the scarlet lady,’ Barkley chanted, silky soft. ‘Who fear being damned cannot be blessed.’ His fingers whi
rred, the cards flew. A yellow hand, reaching out from the crush, hovered over one, then another. ‘He who hesitate be lost,’ Barkley said. The yellow hand descended; the seven of spades turned up. ‘Nothing venture, nothing gain,’ Barkley said. ‘Virtue be its own reward.’ And he set the cards flying again.

  Sasha stood beneath a mammoth Toshiba sign, at work on his neon suntan; but it was an uphill slog. Some signs had been switched off for the night, others dimmed. Instead of refracted orange and passion pink, the air was turned a greenish gray, like a marathon runner out of gas. Still the dry wind crackled, burned. ‘You want to know one sad thing?’ Sasha asked.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m missing Brooke Shields.’

  When first he’d come here, at seventeen, her image had been everywhere. Her rump in tight bluejeans – Nothing comes between me and my Calvins – had towered forty feet high; her puckered lips, soda-sipping, stretched half a block. ‘World was her clam,’ Sasha said. Now the world had gone Japanese, and Sasha Zim was twenty-five. ‘Those were days,’ he said.

  ‘UsedToBe?’

  ‘Yob tvoyu mat!’

  Arm in arm, two old codgers, we strolled towards Nathan’s Famous, where they played a more elderly game. Its doorway was full of uniformed lawmen with drawn guns and walkietalkies. Three youths, spread-eagled against the plate-glass window, assumed the position. ‘Don’t tell my mother,’ one pleaded.

  ‘You shot a man,’ his captor said.

  ‘Just barely,’ said the boy, a Hispanic. Blood ran down his chin, made stains on his white T-shirt. ‘You don’t have to tell. Why you have to tell?’ he whined.

  ‘Who gave you the gun?’

  ‘Idano. Some guy.’ The boy’s voice was shrill with panic, a schoolchild’s squeak. ‘You don’t know my mother. She get so mad,’ he said. His legs began to tremble and twitch, out of his control. ‘Why for you wanna make her mad?’ he asked.

  Now the Deuce was half-deserted. Every storefront was padlocked, every window barred. Only the all-night movies ran on: Mad Monkey Kung Fu and Basket Case, Splatter University, Jail Bait.

  Next door to the New Amsterdam was a sign that read CHESS AND CHECKERS CLUB OF NEW YORK. At the top of a steep flight of steps, we entered a large open room, bright and clean, the image of decorum. Beneath a glass counter was a collection of antique cakes and sandwiches, neatly wrapped; coffee was served in white cups. On the walls, there were pictures of sunlit valleys, of grasslands and blue skies.

  Scattered about the room, men of all races faced each other over Formica-topped tables, pondering the complexities of backgammon, Scrabble, chess. Most of them wore suits and ties, and none of them was young. Sages, elders, they spoke only when they had to, and then in undertones. Nobody laughed, no one swore. These were serious men.

  Close beside the glass counter, a man slouched in an upright chair, half asleep. We sat down beside him, watched the play. Cards slapped on the tabletops, setting up irregular riffs; dice rattled like snakes; the players murmured, droned. ‘Don’t shoot,’ said the sleeping man.

  Startled by his own voice, he sat up straight; he opened his left eye. Stray hairs stuck up angrily on his skull and his Adam’s apple jumped, giving him the look of an outraged turkey-cock, old but fierce in pride. ‘So you got here,’ he said, seeing us. ‘It’s about goddamn time.’

  His name was Leopold Fischbein, Leo Fish; he’d been on the Deuce since 1937. For thirty years he worked at the Hotel Carter when it was still the Dixie, In The Center Of Everything. Afterwards, he took stock at the Superfly Boutique, sold tickets at the Liberty and the Victory, was a counterman in Nedick’s. Six years ago, he had retired, gone to live with his married sister in Ithaca, New York. But the arrangement did not take. ‘Adele is a bundle of laughs. Always looks on the bright side,’ he said. ‘I got disgusted, I guess.’

  He’d been back in town for fourteen months. Mostly, he stayed at a friend’s place in the Village. Mort Raditz, they’d worked together at the Dixie. But that had its drawbacks, too. At seventy-three, after forty years married and eight as a widower, Mort had taken to bringing home boys. ‘Weekends I don’t mind,’ Leo said. ‘I figure weekends, a man can do what the fuck a man wants. But Wednesdays!’ He shook his head, appalled. ‘Wednesdays was our bowling night.’

  In this upper room, he found sanctuary. ‘They got a nice class of person; you don’t get slapped around,’ he said. ‘My age, you don’t like to get slapped around.’ He could sit and doze, bum a few cigarettes, chew over a few grievances, reflect. From the high windows, he could look down and watch Broadway die.

  ‘Ashes to ashes,’ he said. Every time he looked in the paper, it seemed, there was a fresh nail in the coffin. The Urban Development board kept unveiling new architects’ models, more Lego-brick hotels and office towers, merchandise marts, thirty-four-floor parking lots. The Deuce’s theaters were being systematically condemned and taken over by the state, to be turned into arts centers and glass lobotomats. Even the New Amsterdam, Ziegfeld’s folly, was not safe. Its steel frame had corroded; rain was pouring in through the rotted roof. ‘They might save it for a museum,’ said Leo Fish. ‘But living people? Don’t make me laugh.’

  The living people were the problem. ‘You want to turn Times Square into Disneyland, you gotta disinfect it. You want to disinfect it, you gotta kill it dead,’ Leo said. He brightened at the thought. ‘Course, I’m half-dead already, it don’t make no odds.’ He cracked his knuckles, and the chess players swung their heads, outraged. But Leo showed no remorse. ‘I had my time. Take me out of the oven, I’m done,’ he said. Rising up, he reached for his coat and hat. ‘So long, suckers,’ he said.

  It was very late; even Times Square was dark. Spent, we rested on the base of George M. Cohan’s statue. ‘The Broadway man has a better idea of life and things in general than any other class of man in the world. He sees more, meets more, and absorbs more in a day than the average individual will in a month,’ Cohan had said. But no Broadway men were left around. All the arcades were shut, sonic youth disbanded, the neon stilled. Alone with the pigeons, we stared across the wind-driven square. ‘What of are you thinking?’ Sasha asked.

  ‘Carmen Venus Colon,’ I began. ‘Ousmane and Ismaila, Stoney Bisonette, Rickey O and Refugio, Maynard Baines, Ellen Fogarty, the Dad, Robert Moses, Dom Parisi, Liquor Jack Young, Lucius Havens, Tony Bruan, P. T. Barnum, Joe Wojcik and Velma, Matty Troy, Donald Manes, George Washington Plunkitt, EmCee Marie, Enid Gerlin, Shaquille Cleamons and Lionel Ward Justice, Mercedes Purissima Vargas, Sam Wing, Uncle Seven and Eddie Chan, Bobby 2 Bad, Joice Heth, General Tom Thumb and Commodore Nutt, Tommy Blalock, Motion, Paul Kasmin, Donald Baechler, Lev Mikhailovich, J. J. Huneker and Sidney Falco, Cleveland Blakemore, Rashan Ray Perry, Benny and MoRitz, Dr Davitt, Flo D’Arcy and Aug. Allaire, Calvin Palmer, Archie Smith and Satan, Sadie, Denise Denise, Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit, Tracy Love, Bert Randolph Sugar, Fred Silver, Terry Malloy and Charlie DeVoe, Sister Pearl, Lenny Schneider, Katy Freeway, Bob Anthony, Sarah and Serena, the Emerald Doyles, Emile Griffith, Jimmy Glenn, Texas Guinan, Tony Slydini, Mike Bornstein, Ray Crabtree and Richard Roffman, Dick Falk, the Great Herman.’ I gave it up. ‘Stuff like that,’ I said.

  It was past five when I got back to the Hotel Moose. First light glimmered, but the windstorm kept up unabated. It did not seem that it would ever be done.

  The corridors were deserted. Even Motion had ceased his gardening. Inside my room, Lush Life lay on her back with her legs stuck straight out and her hands folded in her lap. A single candle burned at the foot of the bed. It cast the shadows of her big feet, toes upturned, like upreared horses on the wall.

  She did not move when I came in. My first thought was that it was true, she really was dead. But when I looked in her eyes, the pupils were dilated, compressed into tiny black holes.

  An empty smack deck lay crumpled among the marigolds. On the wrapper, rubber-stamped, it said HARD CANDY. ‘Got any Heath Bars?’ Lush Life asked. Her voice was as scratch
y as an old 78. ‘Or a Butterfinger, maybe?’

  ‘Out,’ I said.

  ‘Milk and cookies would do.’

  ‘Out,’ I said. ‘Out.’

  ‘Ladybeard,’ she said. ‘What’s the use?’

  Her burn-scarred kimono lay plopped on the floor. I scooped it up blind, cast it at her nakedness. Its edge clung to her genitals like seaweed to a scallop shell; she started to scratch. ‘You wanna know something?’ Lush Life said. ‘I’m glad.’

  She had met Tommy Blalock as appointed, at Tad’s Steaks on Forty-second. It was their special place. For $4.39, you could get sirloin steak charbroiled, served with garlic bread and onions, a baked potato running with lard, and each table came with its own candle. Even the streetcombers who hung across your shoulder, ready to pounce on any scraps you failed to keep down, couldn’t squelch the romance. But this day something did not smell right. ‘The grease wasn’t rancid; there was no stink of lye,’ Lush Life said. And Tommy Blalock did not eat his baked potato. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. It was the first time he’d ever referred to himself as anything but Tommy Blalock. ‘I just wondered,’ he said.

  ‘Eat your bake,’ said Lush Life.

  ‘I don’t feel good.’ His tousled head was down, his nose stuck in his plate. ‘I got a sick headache,’ he said. ‘My blood’s all backed up. Feels like it’s flowing upstream.’

  ‘Kiss,’ said Lush Life. ‘Kiss my.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Kiss my sweet lips.’

  ‘I just can’t.’

  She put her hand out, her left hand, just touched him lightly on his wrist. Tommy Blalock threw it off him. But Lush Life refused to be shuffled. Again she touched him, this time his cheek. And now his head came up, he looked in her face, and his voice was so ugly, just mean. ‘Get your hand the fuck off me,’ he said.