Until Benny encountered Lillian Waldbaum, I had always assumed girls didn’t know what you were after. Every Saturday night, when I went into the Hebrew National for the hot Gabilla’s knishes that I was about to carry up into the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street, I always felt like the first kid on the block who had latched onto Casanova in the Hamilton Fish Park branch of the New York Public Library.
My God, the stuff that goes on in books. I suppose that’s why they are the plinth on which all education stands. When I think of the things I first learned about what really goes on in life, just by using my library card, my mind responds as it did in the days of innocence: it boggles.
It was from books that Benny Kramer learned how to feel when he was up in the balcony of Loew’s 180th Street with his hot Gabilla’s knishes. Shrewd. Clever. A canny conspirator. Setting the trap in which I would catch that lovely, seductive, sexy butterball waiting for me so innocently in the balcony seat near the red exit sign. And why shouldn’t Benny Kramer have thought so? After all, I always did catch her. But there are women and women. And Lillian Waldbaum taught me the difference.
They both know the score. But the sweet ones, the Hannah Halperns, allow you to think they never even suspected there was a scoreboard, and so what happens is a delicious surprise. You think so, anyway. The others, the non-sweet ones, they let you know right away that while they know the score they are not particularly impressed with the knowledge. Okay, buster, they say, I know what you want, let’s see if you can get it. You usually do, and it is not bad, but there is no sweetness in it. As the oddballs who climb mountains are reputed to say, you do it because it is there.
Benny Kramer, on his first date with Lillian Waldbaum, knew it was there. And precisely where it was located. Staking out the terrain, it was in the fourth row, on the left, of the Preshinivetz Playhouse on West Fourteenth Street. The Preshinivetz Playhouse was a fascinating place for Benny Kramer.
West Fourteenth Street is a shallow thoroughfare. It was anyway, in 1931. It had the feel of a neighborhood that knew it was being exploited. And it gave you the sense of being watched that is common to all ghettos. You felt that people were peering out at you. Not necessarily with hostility. But not with open-hearted warmth, either.
The Preshinivetz Playhouse was located in the Hoboe Kioboe Catholic Church of St. Francis the True. The church had been started by a small, passionate sect of—the confused owner of the building believed—Poles from Woloshonowa. They never got very far beyond starting. They faded away, leaving behind them a small mountain of unpaid bills, and a large room that looked like a grocery store without shelves into which had been dragged three aisles of primitively constructed benches. These had been intended to serve as pews.
I liked the place at once. This was the sort of dump in which Benny Kramer had spent the recreational hours of his youth. I was very young, but already I thought of part of my life as my youth. It seems odd to me now. But not in 1931. The young tend to confuse themselves with the world, which is old.
When Lillian Waldbaum and I came into the Preshinivetz Playhouse it was almost full. But the passes provided by Lillian’s friend had effectively held our seats in the fourth row on the left. Lillian and I settled down and looked around. Now that I was off my feet, I liked the place even better. All the people who were jamming the benches looked like me and Lillian.
I don’t mean that all the girls were as pretty as Lillian and all the men were as interesting looking as Benny Kramer who, as we all know, never claimed to be the model for the Arrow Collar ad.
I mean they all looked and smelled like young people who had dashed, without time out for showers, naturally, from their jobs on 34th Street or their courses in the evening session at C.C.N.Y. Hurtling themselves across the city to reach this redolent theater on West Fourteenth Street because they believed it was important to see a group of amateur actors perform a play called Walda Wexler Wait for Willie Wishingrad: Urgent! In 1931 they knew how to put together titles.
Yet, even for 1931, Walda Wexler Wait for Willie Wishingrad: Urgent! was unique. I did not realize it at the time. At the time it seemed perfectly normal. Especially if you went to see such a thing with an intense girl like Lillian Waldbaum. She had deep, dark, tragic, erotic circles under her eyes.
Two or three years ago, however, in 1969 I think it was, Walda Wexler Wait for Willie Wishingrad; Urgent! resurfaced in the life of Benny Kramer in a rather odd way.
I have a client named Kermit Klinger. His family is loaded. Kermit’s father, Gershon Klinger, invented the underarm dress shield at a time when my father was bending over a sewing machine in an Allen Street sweatshop. Gershon Klinger is almost ninety and, as we say in the trade, I do his work. I like the old man because he reminds me of my father. If my father had been solvent, that is. Gershon Klinger has worked out and keeps enunciating a rule of life with which I do not know how to quarrel.
“Take it away from the old bastards,” he says, “and give it to the kids.”
He has given an awful lot of it to his son Kermit. I know. I drew the papers.
Young Kermit, in addition to the money, has all sorts of weird, not very well thought out but extremely intense ideas for proving to the world he is more than a rich man’s son. He is. Kermit Klinger is a rich man’s son who is also a Broadway press agent. I am told by other clients that Kermit is the best Broadway press agent in the business. Which is why he is constantly scheming to get out of the business. In 1969 he came to see me in my office. “Benny,” he said, “I got it made.” Kermit Klinger is thirty years my junior. But I like the way he calls me Benny. Nothing patronizing about it. Kermit calls me Benny the way he calls his shoeshine boy Tony. He’s paying for a service. Part of the service includes the right to enjoy the pleasure of being on a relaxed first-name basis with the servitor.
“What is it this time?” I said.
With Kermit Klinger there have been many times.
“No, this time I’ve got it,” Kermit said. “No kidding, Benny, I’ve got it. I’ve found a play. Brenda found it for me.
Brenda is Kermit’s wife. Her father invented the disposable diaper. Ours is the century in which the big fortunes are made not in heavy metals, but in simplifying matters at almost any human orifice.
“Everybody thinks Brenda is a dum-dum,” Kermit Klinger said of his wife. “Because she’s not always in there pitching with the bing-bing talk, and her father made it with the disposable diaper, and she went to Sarah Lawrence.”
“My wife went to Sarah Lawrence,” I said.
Kermit Klinger looked at me with annoyance. “Are you comparing your Elizabeth Ann to my Brenda?”
If I were, my Elizabeth Ann would have been justified in sending me to Coventry until the ground hog sees his own shadow.
“No,” I said. “Of course I’m not. I merely want to make the point that just because a girl went to Sarah Lawrence—”
“Listen, Benny,” Kermit said. “At the rates you log me in on your billing diary for these visits, don’t make points I can get for free from the kid who takes my shoes down to be shined in the barbershop in the lobby of my office building.”
“Are they vici kid?” I said.
“What?” Kermit Klinger said.
“Your shoes,” I said. “Are they made of vici kid?”
“What the hell is vici kid?” Kermit said.
“Let me have a look,” I said.
Kermit put his right foot up on my desk. Lovely. Ira Bern would have approved.
“It’s vici kid all right,” I said.
“So what?” Kermit said.
I took a dime from my pocket and tossed it across the desk. “Give that to the kid who takes your shoes down to be shined,” I said.
Kermit picked up the dime. He looked puzzled. Who could blame him? “What for?” he said.
“Tell the kid to buy himself a ruggle.”
Kermit laughed. “Benny,” he said. “How long since you had your last ruggle?”
My mind darted back to Maurice Saltzman & Company. “Nineteen thirty-one, I think.”
Kermit shook his head. “Boy, oh boy, oh boy,” he said.“You pay lawyers a fortune to give you advice, and they don’t even know about ruggles. Benny, boy, I have a ruggle and coffee for breakfast every morning at the Stage Deli before I go up to the office. At the Stage Deli, Benny, a ruggle today goes for sixty cents. You add the twenty-five cents for the cup of coffee you need to dunk it in, and you’ve shot the ass out of a buck before you even get to the tip.”
“Well,” I said, “in nineteen thirty-one—”
“Benny, I was not around in nineteen thirty-one,” Kermit Klinger said. “When I first encountered the ruggle, the Japs had just dropped the old Sixth Avenue El on us at Schofield Barracks, and I was getting my brains knocked out by Mr. Frohnknecht, my intermediate algebra teacher at James Monroe High School. So stop already with the price of ruggles and let’s get back to this wonderful play Brenda found for me in the public domain.”
“You mean it was copyrighted more than fifty-six years ago?” I said.
“No,” Kermit said. “It was written during the Depression, and they did it in one of those dumps on West Fourteenth Street. A mimeograph job. They never bothered to copyright the damn thing.”
“What’s so wonderful about it?” I said.
“It gives the period,” Kermit said. “I mean—boy, does it give the period! Get with it, Benny. Everybody these days is nuts about nostalgia. Picture books at twenty bucks a throw on how to make clabber down in Williamsburg at the time Cornwallis was surrendering to Washington at Yorktown. Old photograph albums with that cockamamy Police Gazette type face showing women in bustles eating turtle soup with Diamond Jim Brady at the old Waldorf on Thirty-fourth and Fifth. People breaking down the doors of the Imperial and the Majestic at ice prices to see revivals of these cruddy musicals from the days when chorus girls were as flat-chested as Buster Keaton, and DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson were writing those songs for diabetics called ‘When I Take My Sugar to Pee.’ You know, Benny. Everything was simpler in nineteen thirty-one. Simpler and better. Remember? There were breadlines, sure. But people helped each other. They shared what they had. And what they had was guess what? Bubkes. Natch. Al Capone was beating out the brains of rival gangsters with a baseball bat at public banquets, but he did it in a nice way. Norman Rockwell was painting those covers on The Saturday Evening Post that showed The Old Country Doctor putting his stethoscope to a little girl’s doll. There was no drug scene. The only thing high school kids shot was baskets in the gym. No campus riots. College kids were too busy swallowing goldfish and seeing how many freshmen could fit into a phone booth. No acid rock. It was ‘Sweet Adeline’ and ‘The Whiffenpoof Song’ all the way. Kids just hustled out of high school to compete for that job in the bank, and if they got it, and they kept their noses clean, they ended up Judge Brandeis or Howard Hughes. That crap.”
“It is not crap,” I said. “I mean it wasn’t. It was a time when—”
“I know,” Kermit said. “I’ve heard about it. It’s coming out of my ears.”
“Then why,” I said, “why do you want to produce a play written about it?”
“Because this play is not about it,” Kermit said. “This play is it. The damn thing jumps at you off the page. It’s not Norman Rockwell. It’s real. So real it hurts. This play wasn’t written. No pens, no typewriters, no pencils. This play was walloped out with a sledge hammer. It takes place in one of those cheap dumps they used to call meeting halls. On West Fourteenth. A strike meeting is about to take place. Taxi drivers. They’re sick and tired of starving and being lied to by the fleet owners. They’re meeting to vote on whether they should go out or not. The whole play, the beauty part of it, Benny, it all takes place before the strike meeting gets under way. The drivers, all these angry tough guys, in this stinking dump on Fourteenth Street, they’re waiting for their leader. He’s late because he’s in an important meeting with the fleet owners down at City Hall. Whatever news he comes back with, that’s what will decide the men should they strike or shouldn’t they. This strike leader, he’s sent these guys a message. Don’t do nothing till I show up. I’ll bring the dope with me. So the tension is built in. From the minute the curtain goes up, you’re sweating it out with these guys, waiting for what the hell kind of news their leader will bring.
“While they’re waiting we see a whole series of flashbacks. Maybe ten or twelve. I’m not sure. I only had time to read the goddamn script just once. But these flashbacks, they’re the guts of the play. Each one tells the story of one of the hackies pouring into the meeting hall, and what this strike would mean to him. They’re ball-breakers, Benny, every one of these stories. They disintegrate you. There’s like this young kid, he wants to be a doctor, and he’s hacking to save enough dough to go to medical school, but he’s also stuck on a broad, and the girl wants to get married, but if he goes out on strike that’s goodbye Charlie to both medical school and getting married. Then there’s, let’s see, yeah, there’s this guy, his wife is dying. It doesn’t exactly say in the script the big C, but you know it’s not halitosis either, and he’s got to earn the money to keep her in the hospital, and the strike would mean curtains to that. I tell you, Benny, it’s terrific stuff. It hits you where you live. I cried, Benny. Can you imagine? Me, Kermit Klinger. I burst into tears. Twice. No, wait. One, two, three. Yeah. Three times, Benny. I cried three times. The tension keeps building and building until you feel—”
“The title of this play,” I said. “Would it happen to be Walda Wexler Wait for Willie Wishingrad: Urgent!?”
Kermit Klinger looked at me with a frown of annoyance. I didn’t blame him. He had been going good. Building toward his punch line. And I had taken it away from him.
“How did you know that?” Kermit said coldly.
“I was there,” I said.
“Where?” Kermit said.
“The Preshinivetz Playhouse,” I said. “On West Fourteenth Street. I went to a preview.”
“Of Walda Wexler Wait for Willie Wishingrad: Urgent!?” Kermit said sharply.
“That’s right,” I said.
“When?”
“In nineteen thirty-one,” I said.
“You really remember it?” Kermit said.
Remember it? I was reliving it. I was no longer sitting in my Madison Avenue office, logging in on my work diary a lucrative visit from a client. I was young again. I was back in 1931. Sitting on a piece of dirty bench in the fourth row, left aisle, of the Preshinivetz Playhouse on West Fourteenth Street. And I was shaking with the impact of this extraordinary theatrical experience. And suddenly Lillian Waldbaum gave me a sharp poke in the ribs.
I gasped. We had come to the climax of the play. Everybody in the audience turned. Down the aisle, striding with majestic decision toward the stage, came the man all the people in the play had been waiting for: the leader of the strike.
“Hey!” Lillian Waldbaum said. “There’s one of our former clients!”
I squinted to bring the young man into better focus. He leaped to the stage. He turned to face the audience. He raised his hands above his head. The theater was suddenly hushed. He spoke in a low voice. So low that, like everybody, else, I found myself leaning forward to hear it.
“Strike!” Sebastian Roon said.
10
THE BACKSTAGE AREA IN THE Preshinivetz Playhouse was not really a backstage area. Just a sort of undefined shallow smudge. Standing in it was the girl who had played the part of Walda Wexler. Standing next to her was Sebastian Roon.
“Benjamin!” he said.
He came across to me, and he did something no other Englishmen I have ever met would have done. Seb threw his arms around my shoulders and held me for a few minutes in a tight hug. He was, after all, a Jewish English man.
“By George,” he said, “it’s marvelous to see you.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. What had happened the year before, and how I thought I
would feel if ever met him again, was now all mixed up with the way I suddenly did feel. All at once my throat seemed ill-equipped for conversation.
“You two know each other?” said the girl who had played Walda Wexler.
“Know each other?” said Lillian Waldbaum. “These two jokers used to get drunk together in Shane’s on Twenty-third Street.”
Seb released me. He gave Lillian a sharp, startled, frowning glance. Then his face cleared and he laughed.
“So we did.” He held out his hand. “You must know something about the workings of the Maurice Saltzman office, Miss—?”
“Waldbaum,” Lillian said.
“I regret to say that the only person I knew in the Maurice Saltzman office was Benjamin,” Seb said. “I have a feeling I missed something, Miss Waldbaum.”
Lillian gave him the sort of look that would have safely fastened Martin Luther’s thundering assaults on the Pope to the door of the Wittenberg cathedral. “It’s too late to rectify the omission,” she said. “I’m loyal.” Lillian jerked her thumb toward me. “I’m gunna dance with de guy what brung me.”
“What are you two talking about?” said the girl who had played the part of Walda Wexler.
Seb laughed again. “Let’s do our talking across some hot food,” he said. “I’m famished.”
He shoveled us gently out into West Fourteenth Street and then poked us left into the Village. It was an area about which I knew very little. Yet on that night when Sebastian Roon and I met again, it seemed to me that I was rediscovering a once familiar place. I did not realize the reason until much later. Totally unaware of what was happening to him, Benny Kramer was falling in love.
Perhaps that’s why Benny still remembers the feel of that walk. In those days the Village was already run down, but in a delicious way. Like Montparnasse. Or Soho. The houses were crumbly at the edges, but they looked soft and inviting. Like good sponge cake that has been cut with a dull knife. You wondered what went on inside those houses.
The Village of 1931 reminded me of the London in which Sherlock Holmes used to leap out of the fog into a hansom cab, bark an order at the desiccated old creep on the box and then, as he sank into the seat, rap out: “And an extra shilling, my good man, if you make Charing Cross before midnight!”
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