Sad Stories of the Death of Kings
Roy’s friend Magic Frank had a job cleaning up the Tip Top Burlesque House on Saturday and Sunday nights, which, because he began work at three thirty on the following days, was actually Sunday and Monday mornings. According to the law, during business hours patrons and workers at the Tip Top had to be at least eighteen years old and Magic Frank was only sixteen, but since the girlie shows stopped at three the city ordinance did not apply to him. He’d gotten the job through his older brother, Moose, who played poker on Thursday nights with the Tip Top’s owner, Herman “Lights Out” Trugen. Moose told Frank that Trugen’s nickname derived from his habit of turning out lights to save money on electricity. Trugen, who was in his sixties, supposedly had been pals with the comedic actor W. C. Fields, another famous miser who kept padlocks on his telephones to which only he had the keys. In Berlin, Moose said, Herman Trugen had operated a whorehouse favored by the Nazis, several of whom helped him escape Germany during the Holocaust. Trugen’s two sisters and a brother had died in Auschwitz.
Magic Frank did not like to go alone to State and Congress, so on Christmas Eve he asked Roy to accompany him, promising to buy Roy breakfast after he’d finished mopping the theater and taking out the trash. It was already officially Christmas on Sunday night when the boys got to the Tip Top early, at two thirty, in order to catch the last show.
“I thought you couldn’t get in until the place was closed,” Roy said.
“I got a key to the back door,” said Magic Frank, “and Trugen don’t come in Sundays. The other guys don’t care, they just nod or wave and let me sit and watch if I want.”
“What about the strippers?”
“What about ’em?”
“You know any?”
“Not really. By the time I come in, they’re dog tired. They mostly just get dressed and leave.”
A cold, sporadic rain pelted the boys as they walked down Dearborn past Van Buren, then turned left on Congress Parkway, where a gust of wind hit them flush in the face.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Frank cried. “As soon as I can, I’m movin’ to Miami.”
Magic Frank led Roy down an alley just west of State Street to the rear of the Tip Top and unlocked the back door. Roy followed him through the offices into the theater. The show was on so the boys snuck up a side aisle to the very last row and took seats. Two middle-aged, red-nosed men were on stage.
“Where was you last night, Al?” one asked the other.
“Inna cemetery.”
“A cemetery?”
“That’s right, Joe.”
“What were you doin’ inna cemetery at night?”
“Buryin’ a stiff.”
The dozen or so members of the audience barely acknowledged this stale joke despite an urgent roll on the snare drum and the cymbal crash that punctuated it. To Roy, the comedians looked as beat as the pit band sounded once they began an overture to the last stripper of the night.
“And now, for the delectation not to mention play-zeer of you germs out there,” announced Joe, the fellow who had performed the apocryphal interment, “direct from Paris—that’s a burg in southern Illinois—guaranteed to raise your spirits if nothin’ else, the proud proprietor of the best breasts in the Middle West, Miss May Flowers!”
May Flowers entered stage left as the duo departed stage right. Draped in a bodice-hugging, floor length, bright yellow gown, she sashayed around out of synch to the pit band’s dull rendering of “Night Train.” Her high-piled hair was fiery red.
“Sonny Liston uses this tune to jump rope by,” Roy whispered to Magic Frank.
Before she stripped, Miss Flowers looked to be about forty years old. After her act was finished, Roy thought, she looked even older. Her breasts were long and narrow and set wide apart, the nipples sporting silver pasties; once released from imprisonment, they depended almost to her hips. During May’s flounce and inevitable divestiture, the few witnesses who had paid to get in out of the cold expressed no particular emotions that Roy could easily discern. Most of them remained passive, if not in fact comatose, undisturbed by this jactitative offering. Those individuals deep in slumber went undetected by the performer, their snores rendered inaudible by the unenthusiastic strains of Jimmy Forrest’s signature composition. May Flowers completed her act without much of a flourish. Once having shed all but a strategically positioned gold lamé triangle, she strode quickly out of sight and for all anyone knew directly out of the building.
Miss Flowers was not in evidence once Roy and Magic Frank went backstage. The musicians beat a hasty retreat as well, and two cadaverous-complexioned ushers hustled the patrons into the inhospitable night. It was part of Frank’s job to turn off the lights and make sure the doors were locked, so the ushers took off as soon as they were certain all of the customers had gone.
Roy asked Magic Frank if there was anything he could do to help him, and Frank said he could empty the waste baskets from the office and dump them into a garbage can in the alley. Roy consolidated the contents of the several baskets into one and carried it outside, careful to prop open the door with a chair so as not to lock himself out. As he was emptying the trash, May Flowers walked out of the theater into the alley, carrying a bag and a box with a handle. She was wearing a big beaver coat with a small matching hat. Roy shivered in the icy rain.
“Nasty night, ain’t it?” she said.
Roy looked at her and asked, “How do you get all of your hair under that little hat?”
“You mean the wig I wear durin’ my act? It’s in here,” said May Flowers, lifting the box. “There’s a pack of cigs and a lighter in the left side pocket of my coat. Could you be a good egg and take ’em out and light one up for me?”
Roy put down the waste basket, fished a hand into the pocket of May’s coat and dug out a pack of Viceroys and a gold lighter.
“Pull one and torch it, honey,” she said.
Roy put a cigarette between his lips and flicked the lighter. Up close, she looked a lot like his grandmother.
“Just stick it in,” said May Flowers, parting her lips.
Roy transferred the Viceroy from his mouth to hers, then replaced the pack in the beaver coat pocket.
“You’re a livin’ doll,” she said. “Don’t you end up like these bums come in this dive don’t do nothin’ but tell each other sad stories of the death of kings. Merry Christmas.”
May Flowers walked away. Roy picked up the waste basket and went back into the building. Magic Frank was putting a mop and bucket into a closet.
“I just saw May Flowers in the alley,” Roy told him. “She asked me to light a cigarette for her.”
“No kiddin’. What else did she say?”
“That I shouldn’t end up like the men who come here.”
Later, when the boys were in a diner, Frank said, “Wow, first night at the Tip Top and you got to meet May Flowers.”
A scabrous Christmas tree, bedraped sparingly with tinsel, stood by the door.
“Yeah,” said Roy, “but I wish I hadn’t seen her breasts first.”
The Sultan
James “The Sultan” Word died last week. I read his obituary in the local newspaper, one of the paid obits, not a byline in the sports section, which he deserved. The Sultan was a terrific prize fighter for fifteen years, a guy nobody liked to fight, a counterpuncher who made opponents come to him. If he got in with a hard charger who tried to wrap him up, Word would wade in quickly and catch him by surprise. According to the paper, James was one month shy of his fiftieth birthday when he died; no reason for his demise was given.
I remembered that he worked for the sanitation department as a garbage collector back in his boxing days because his income from matches was erratic. The Sultan was a sweet character, a soft-spoken, tan-complexioned, good-looking welterweight with a Ray Robinson mustache and permanent smile. He was
given his nickname by Aroundel X, a Black Muslim friend of Word’s, who told James that he resembled a Mohammedan Sultan and was put on earth to dominate any Turks who dared to defy him. I don’t know that James bought into Aroundel X’s concept, but the nickname stuck.
The Sultan and I played chess together on Saturday mornings at Yardbird’s Gym when it was on Magazine Street while my sons worked out on the bags and sparred in the ring. One-eyed Eddie, James’s trainer, let him rest Saturdays and tutored my boys while we played on a card table off to one side. The Sultan played chess the way he fought, shyly, staying away until I made an improvident move, depending on an opponent’s impatience to provide him an opening so that he could sneak in a shot. Win or lose, The Sultan never stopped smiling.
I went to his funeral. It was on a Friday and the weather was awful, raining hard with thunder and lightning and even a little hail. I was one of three or four white men among about thirty or forty black people. After it was over I walked away alone and as I did I noticed a stocky young man with big ears who reminded me of a kid I once knew named Ernie Nederland. I first met Nederland when we were both in sixth grade. We went to different schools, so we ran into each other occasionally, at parties or hanging out at parks around town. Ernie was a good-looking guy, girls liked him even though his ears stuck out, and at twelve or thirteen years old he already had the reputation of being a tough kid. He and I got along well whenever we encountered one another; he never seemed particularly aggressive but it was clear that he thought highly of himself. Nederland’s rep stemmed from his family being connected to The Outfit; his uncle was a federal judge who supposedly was in their pocket, and Ernie’s old man was a big deal in the city sanitation department, which was famously controlled by organized crime.
A few years after I moved away, an old friend of mine from high school told me that Ernie Nederland had become a button man. Ernie owned a gas station on the West Side but he made his real bread by shooting people at the behest of The Outfit. According to my friend, as long as Ernie’s victims were known or suspected criminals, his uncle the judge protected him; even if Nederland was arrested, he was never prosecuted.
I don’t know what became of Ernie. When I was in my car driving away from The Sultan’s funeral, I recalled watching Ernie Nederland in a fistfight on a school playground when we were about fifteen. Nederland kept a grin on his face while he fought, and like James Word he let his opponent come to him, taking punches on his arms and elbows without letting the other guy get a clean shot at his face. I’m sure Ernie lost a fight now and again but the time I’m talking about he slipped every roundhouse right and rabbit-punched the kid hard with his left hand, which he used like a hammer. That fight ended after Nederland dropped the other boy, then picked up a two-foot length of lead pipe he’d brought along and cracked the kid’s skull with it. Ernie never stopped smiling the whole time.
The Sultan didn’t, either. I watched him spar numerous times and fight a half dozen and he was always smiling, even when he got hit. I figured he did this to unnerve his opponent, to not let him know he was hurt, a common enough ploy. I thought it a little bit interesting that both The Sultan and Ernie Nederland’s dad were in the sanitation business. As far as I know, Ernie never hoisted a garbage can so long as he could handle a lead pipe or a gun.
Nederland did tell me a story once, a year or so before I saw him pipe that kid. We were at a party and he noticed that I was watching one girl dance with more than casual interest. She had a ponytail and was wearing a yellow sweater. She was dancing with another girl.
“You know her?” Ernie asked me.
“No,” I said. “Do you?”
“I know about her.”
“What do you know?”
“She’s dyin’.”
I looked at him. “How do you know?” I looked back at her. “She doesn’t look sick.”
“She had a heart operation, got a thick scar on her chest from where the doctors opened her up.”
“She showed you?”
Ernie shook his head. “An older guy I know, Al Phillips, done it with her a few times. He’s seen it.”
It was uncommon for kids in those days, especially girls, to have sex before the age of sixteen or seventeen, but I believed Nederland.
“How do you know for sure that she’s dying?”
Ernie pulled a pack of Camels from a pocket, shook one out, lit it and inhaled.
“Want one?” he asked.
“No, thanks,” I said.
Nederland blew a couple of smoke rings.
“Al Phillips told me,” he said. “Doctors told her folks after she got out of the hospital a year ago, when she was twelve and a half, that she should enjoy herself for the time she had left. They didn’t say how long that might be. It’s probably why she started doin’ it so young. Her name’s Daisy Green.”
I watched Daisy Green dance. She moved better than most of the other girls.
“Real slinky, ain’t she?” said Nederland. “Al says she’ll do anything.”
He rapidly exhaled a trio of smoke rings and went to talk to somebody on the other side of the room.
The record that had been playing ended and “Good Golly, Miss Molly” came on. Daisy Green and the other girl continued dancing together. I thought about cutting in but I didn’t. It felt strange knowing that she would be dead soon and that she was more sexually experienced than I.
A week after The Sultan’s funeral there was a small article in the newspaper stating that police had arrested a man suspected of having murdered James Word during an attempted street robbery. The suspect, Tyrus Chatmon, had shot James twice in the chest. There were photographs of Chatmon and Word; only The Sultan was smiling.
The Liberian Condition
The day Omar Buell appeared in the schoolyard wearing only a pair of worn brown combat boots and holding a deer rifle is a day nobody who was there will ever forget. It was a windy, cloudy afternoon in late February or early March, just before the bell rang signaling the end of lunch hour. Dirty snow was piled up around the edges of the schoolyard and kids were running around playing tag or, like my friends and I, playing touch football. I was eleven years old and had known Omar Buell since we had both been in first grade. He always wore a wash-faded, longsleeved, checkered flannel shirt buttoned up to his neck, baggy green or gray trousers and raggedy, black and white high-top gym shoes. He didn’t talk much to other kids and never hung around the playground after school. Buell was not an outstanding student, either; he always got passing grades but consistently placed near or at the bottom of the class. There was nothing to really distinguish him except, perhaps, for his hair, which he wore longer than most and was the color of August wheat. Once I heard Heidi Dilg, a girl in our fourth grade class, say she wished she had hair that color.
Omar Buell, naked except for combat boots and holding a Winchester .30-30, shocked everyone. All of the kids stopped playing and stared at him. Omar stood still without shivering even though the temperature was a smidge above freezing. Mrs. Polansky, who taught health and home economics and was a schoolyard monitor, ran into the building right after Raymond Drain, a sixth grader who was infamous for once having taken a shit on the floor in the back of a classroom in front of everybody, pointed him out to her. None of the kids approached Buell, but nobody ran away. He just stood there looking at us, but not at anyone in particular.
“You’re gonna freeze your pecker off!” Jimmy Groat shouted.
A few of the kids laughed, but Omar Buell did not budge, not even his face muscles moved. I put on my gloves, which I’d stuffed into my coat pockets before we’d begun playing football. Several teachers, including Mrs. Polansky, and the school janitor, Bronko Schulz, came out of the school building and stood off to one side, sizing up the situation. Bronko Schulz was a big, easygoing guy who liked to tell the boys what he considered to be dirty jokes. He once asked me why a penis was the ligh
test thing in the world. I told him I didn’t know and Bronko said, “Just a thought can lift it.” The bell rang but we all stayed where we were.
“What’s wrong, Omar?” said Mr. Brady, an eighth grade English teacher.
Everybody thought Brady was a pretty nice guy. He didn’t shout at kids or tell them to take off their hats or pull up their pants and never told anyone to shut up. If he wanted a kid to stop talking, Mr. Brady would just pat him or her on the shoulder and go on with what he was saying.
When Omar did not respond to Mr. Brady, or even look over at him, Mr. Brady said, “Son, what do you need?”
Miss Riordan, the school nurse, whose father was the head priest at St. Tim’s, handed a red blanket to Mr. Brady.
“You must be cold, Omar,” he said.
The late bell rang. I could see that Bronko Schulz was holding something behind his back that looked like a tire iron.
Mr. Brady walked up to Omar and draped the blanket around his shoulders. Brady did not attempt to take the rifle away from Omar but he put one arm around him and together they walked into the school, followed closely by Bronko Schulz and the other teachers. Nobody said anything to the kids, so we just went back to playing tag and touch football.
I can still see Omar Buell and Mr. Brady walking in the schoolyard with Omar wrapped in a red blanket carrying the deer rifle. I never saw Omar Buell again, but a couple of weeks after the incident Jimmy Groat said that his mother told him Omar had an incurable condition so he had to be locked up in an institution with other incurable nut cases.
The other day I read an article in the newspaper about a Liberian rebel leader who made his men march into battle completely naked carrying only their guns in order to frighten the enemy. He claimed to have been responsible for the deaths of more than 20,000 people, and said that before a fight he made a human sacrifice to the devil, usually killing a child and plucking out the heart, which was divided into pieces for his men to eat.
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