The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

by Tom Wolfe

  “It is a small operation, but more relaxed,” Roy said, “I don’t miss Park Avenue any more. I really don’t. Oh, you might clear $600 a month, but that thing wrung me out. You know what I mean?”

  So Roy is standing out front of the apartment house with its facing of nice diet-size white lavatory brick, Early Sixties Post-Mondrian Chic, with which fine new apartment houses are built. Mrs. Jansen, a matron who is just beginning to get that hummocky, rusty-jointed look about the hips, comes out walking three Welsh Corgies. Roy swings around like a grenadier and beams his 80-watt smile.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Jansen,” Roy says. “Was the—uh—operation a success?”

  “Good Lord, no,” says Mrs. Jansen. “Well, look at them; they’re so little. That man was mad; they can’t stand enemas. But they look so much better, don’t you think so, Roy?”

  Yes, yes, yes, says Roy, and Mrs. Jansen fades up the street with her rusting gams and her three Welsh Corgies, toward the trees on his tree-lined block.

  Roy, on the other hand, from seven years as a doorman in the East Side car-parking dodge, remains youthful in appearance, lively, alert, springy. He relaxes, like a middleweight boxer in training, on the balls of his feet, looking both ways, bobbing up and down in his frogging, his white dickey and his visored cap.

  “As I said,” says Roy, “this is quiet. On Park Avenue I had 50 cars, both sides of the block. Figuring an average of $6 a week for each car, and that’s conservative, conservative, you could gross $1,200 a month. That’s with the transients, too, though.

  “A lot of that you have to pay out. Most of the guys don’t mind the cops, or even the cops’ friends—other cops, you know; I mean, well, hell, O.K. But in my case the super wanted 50 per cent—50 per cent. He just walked up one day and said he wanted 50 per cent.

  “ ‘Look,’ I told him, ‘be reasonable. Enough is enough. Without me you would get nothing from this. You couldn’t run this operation. You’ve got to be fast. Even with the 12 M.D.’s you couldn’t do it….’ ”

  A doctor, with his M.D. license plate, is the most sought-after client in the whole East Side doorman-parking operation. The doorman can stash the M.D. cars in no-parking spaces while he shifts other cars around. A doorman will give an M.D. a rate as low as $3 a week, just to get him. Suppose all his spaces are filled—some with transients at 50 cents per—and one of his regulars pulls up. He must find room for him. So he takes his floater—the M.D. car—out of the line and moves it over to the other side of the street where there is no parking that day. Or he double-parks it. The police will not tag the M.D. car. Of course, one does not want to abuse that fact. The first time someone else pulls out, he brings the floater back into a legal spot.

  “… and you have to know by the way they’re walking and looking that they’re going to get into that car and pull out. So I told the super, ‘Look, you can’t even wait for them to reach for the keys or you’re going to lose the spot. You’ve got to know people,’ I told him. But this super, he doesn’t budge—’50 per cent.’

  “This thing isn’t easy. You’ve got to look after your door, take packages, open this door for them, open the cab door for them, get them a cab—and, boy, some rainy night about 8 P.M. when you’re standing out in the middle of the avenue trying to get a cab for somebody and you see one of your cars pulling out from the curb, well, you get pulled apart right here”—he put his hand on his midsection—“you can actually feel it inside. Of course, you’re going to lose some spots, but….”

  But not this time. Without saying a word, Roy bolts from my side and sprints 40 yards up his tree-lined block, past Mrs. Jansen and the Corgies, who appear quite startled, jumps in a car and revs it up.

  Roy has seen what I had not; a man in one of those $42 East Side Bohemian bulky-knit sweaters is leading his two children toward his Pontiac; now he is opening the front door for them. There is a motion picture theater nearby; cars are coursing through the block, Roy roars up in his M.D. floater, a black Ford Galaxie, and stops right alongside the Pontiac.

  The man in the sweater looks out, nonplussed, but Roy motions him to go ahead and start pulling out. Roy backs up slowly to give him room. A man in a Rambler sees the Pontiac is getting ready to pull out and pulls up ahead so he can back in. So Roy takes off his visor hat and moves up right behind him, blowing his horn. The Rambler takes off. Roy backs up again, just behind the Pontiac once more. A Ford from New Jersey with four kids in it, double-dating, pulls up ahead to back in. Roy puts his visor hat back on, roars up behind it, blows the horn, chases it off, then backs up again as the Pontiac leaves the curb. Roy whips in there and the space is saved. Two spaces, actually.

  Roy bounds back in front of the door.

  “See how I parked it?” he says. “It takes up two spaces. That’s what you’ve got to do when you have too many vacant spaces. You stretch ’em. You have to move all these cars back and forth like an accordion. You can always spot a set-up like this. On an ordinary street the cars are all crammed up. Here they’re stretched out. See these keys”—he pulled a vast ring out from under the frogging of his uniform—“a duplicate for every regular. You couldn’t run this thing without ’em. For the alternate-side parking—you know—I have to shift the whole bunch of them around 11 at night.

  “I’ll tell you something else. You have to know people. When a guy brings his kid out to the car, he’s not just going to reach inside and get something out of the glove compartment. He’s leaving. That’s the time you have to run for the floater.

  “Also you notice how I blocked off that spot. You can’t pull up ahead of somebody pulling out, because one of these Volkswagens or something—boy, you ask any doorman, they hate these Volkswagens—they’ll pull right in there while you’re up ahead with your chin hanging.

  “And did you notice this business I do with the hats? This, if you don’t mind me saying it, is finesse. If you want to chase off an older guy—you know, an adult—you take the hat off, because an older guy, he’ll see this doorman trying to bluff him out of the spot, and he’ll say to himself, ‘Well, that clown isn’t shoving me around. I’m not ninety-seven years old for nothing.’ But for the kids, you put the hat on. A kid in a car, he feels guilty a little, you know, even if he hasn’t done anything. Don’t ask me why, but it’s true. So he sees this hat, and even if he knows it isn’t a cop, he’s not sure what it is, you know? So he scrams off. You saw how that kid scrammed off? That’s what I mean, you have to know people.”

  A little while later Roy says, “Wait a minute, I got to go over to the garage.”

  I had wondered about the garage. It is barely three-fourths of a block away. It rents space to apartment dwellers at $70 a month, and to transients at $2.50 a day, and Roy’s business must be costing them about $10,000 a year. They should be screaming murder. I follow Roy up the block, and I hear him hollering at the entrance, “Hey, Rudy, I got three out here.”

  “Sure, the owner would ruin me if he knew about it,” Roy says, “but the guys in the garage, we work together. Suppose they’re filled up, like tonight with everybody coming to the movie. I tell Rudy, ‘Rudy, I got three out here.’ That means I can take three cars where I got my cars stretched out. Okay. Some guy pulls up to the garage. Without me, Rudy would have to tell the guy, ‘We’re filled up.’ Instead, he takes the guy’s car, and after the guy walks off, he turns it over to me. I park it, and we split the $1.50. Everybody’s happy.

  “Hell, you got to play the angles. I have a wife and two kids in Queens, and you know what my take-home pay as a doorman is? $62.50 a week. I kid you not—sixty-two dollars and fifty cents. So what can you do?

  “Practically every doorman on the East Side has this operation going for him. It runs from about 60th Street to 86th and anywhere from Fifth Avenue all the way over to the river in some parts. In this town, my friend, you play the angles. That’s New York.”

  An old guy in a great chalk-stripe blue suit, English cut, four buttons at the cuff, growing old gracefu
lly the fine worsted way, comes out of the apartment building with three aging belles dames, all linked, lacquered, sprayed, and collared in foxheaded fur.

  “Roy,” he says, “can you get us a cab?”

  And there goes Roy, giving a sweep of his 20-20 eyes over his curbline domain, then streaking out onto the Avenue, blowing his whistle, summoning the hacks. He snares one and here he comes back, cantering down the middle of the street beside the cab and opening the door for the four old parties.

  “There were eight people out there waiting for cabs, Mr. Thornton,” says Roy, the most likely sounding but thoroughly preposterous figure he could think of bubbling up into his brain. He is panting like a Method actor finishing a 3:56 mile. “It’s a lucky thing I know this cab driver. Take good care of them, Raymond. See you around, boy,” he says earnestly and quite familiarly and pockets the dollar bill Mr. Thornton gives him. “Thank you, sir,” he says to that.

  The cabbie stares at Roy and then he looks at me with that quizzical, sempiternal New York cab driver look that asks the impartial judge, “Who the hell is this nut?”

  Chapter 22

  The Big League Complex

  HEY! IT’S JASON! Star of stage, screen and true romance. Right now I could live without other people’s spectacular arrivals. Today one of my ships didn’t come in. I forget which one. Fame, Love, Last Week’s Rent, one of them sank without a bubble. So naturally this is the night I start running into half the successful hotshots in New York, none of whom I have ever laid eyes on before in my life. Out of a cab in front of an apartment house where the servitors haul iron lilies out of the cellar and into the courtyard and paint them green, white and gold every spring, namely, The Dakota, No. 1 West 72nd Street, here comes Jason Robards, dressed up like what the Beatles call a “rocker.”

  A rocker, as opposed to the Beatles, who are fops, is a teen-ager who wears tight Levi’s and leather jackets and says things like “Cool it.” Only Jason Robards, easing himself out of a cab in front of the Dakota, sighing, drooping his eyeballs, is at this moment the best-known actor in New York. He is just coming home after doing his three-hour stint for the second time, the second night of the most publicized play in New York, Arthur Miller’s play about Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, After the Fall. He wears a gray suit in the play, but now he has his skinny shanks encased in a pair of buff-colored Levi’s. He has on a leather jacket and a Tyrolean hat with feathers in it. He is dragging himself up the driveway of the most iron-lilied, sentry-boxed, wood-paneled, maid’s-roomy apartment house in New York City, with his eye pouches sliding down over his cheek-bones. Here is a gray-haired, long-faced man protruding from the collar of his teen-age rocker outfit.

  Two rather grand couples have just walked out of the Dakota, and one of the women says, “Hey! It’s Jason!”

  “He looks exhausted,” says the other one.

  “Jason!” says the first one. “You look exhausted!”

  “Aaaaaggggh!” says Jason. “I feel exhausted. I’m beat.”

  “My God,” says one of the men, in a wonderful bassoon voice, “it must be brutal. I mean, I’m no judge, but how long are you on stage, Jason? It must be three hours!”

  The newspapers have been full of that very intelligence, how Jason Robards is on stage three hours in After the Fall. Robards stares for a moment. Then he shrugs his eyebrows and rolls his eyes back into his optic chiasma and thrashes his mandibles around a little.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, “I am absolutely beat.”

  So a servitor comes out of the sentry box and opens the scrolly iron gate and Jason Robards goes sloughing into the Dakota in his rocker Levi’s of the uptown bohemian Actors Studio genre, and the wide cravats and double-breasted waistcoats lie under glass in muggy memorabilia of Edwin Booth, John Barrymore and the Players Club.

  O.K., there goes Jason Robards. The next thing I remember, I am on West 52nd Street, a block from Broadway. The theatres have let out. Some kids are playing Zonk Ball and shooting the cowboy in the Sports Palace at the corner of Broadway. Down the street women are hunkering in and out of cabs like arteriosclerotic flamingoes and bobbing through the electric pastel shadows of Junior’s Lounge, Roseland and the Confucius Bar, underneath the neon bamboo at Ruby Foo’s and the roadside Dairy Queen marquee of Jilly’s, local throne room for Frank Sinatra and his friends, or just scuffing around the corner by the Republic Auto Parts store, which leads from Broadway back to plain cost-accountable Eighth Avenue again. Across the street at the ANTA Theater, where Marathon ’33 is playing, the show has let out, but there is a little blonde in a great fluffy silver-fox stole standing by the stage door. She has a soft face, very placid. I think I recognize it, but I can’t place it. Then I realize that it is a young movie actress, Tuesday Weld. I have no idea what she is doing there. I don’t know if she is waiting for somebody to come out of the stage door or just standing around on Broadway, out amongst them, like Cassius Clay, who used to promenade down Seventh Avenue near the Metropole Café, just to see how long it took to pull a crowd. People come out of the stage door from time to time, and she gives them the once-over, and they head down 52nd Street. Then a funny thing happens.

  An old man wearing an ulster coat and a homburg is walking west on 52nd Street. As he walks past Tuesday Weld, standing outside the stage door, he looks over and says, “Young lady, you were perfectly marvelous tonight. You were perfectly marvelous.”

  He seems altogether sincere, even though Tuesday Weld has never been in a Broadway play in her life. Tuesday Weld just sort of rolls around in her furs and laughs in a nonplussed way and looks around at the people on the sidewalk as if to ask whether anybody knows if this old guy is trying to put her on. He keeps right on talking. His voice has that upbeat, throbbing note in it, the note that says, “Courage, courage.”

  “You keep it up,” he says. “You’ll be in the movies some day.”

  Then he nods in a very nice way and walks on down 52nd Street.

  Tuesday Weld rolls around a little inside her fur. What else can she do? Is this guy putting her on? He is a nice old man, for Christ’s sake.

  I never do find out what Tuesday Weld is up to. For some reason, I forget exactly why, I head on over to the East Seventies. I am with some people, and we are heading into their apartment when the fellow looks down at the floor by the door next to theirs and says, “What the devil is A——— doing with all those boots?”

  A——— turns out to be a singer everybody has heard of. There is a big, gamey pile of old boots, telephone linesman’s rubber boots, hunter’s boots, all kinds of boots, lying in a promiscuous heap outside her door. It has been snowing.

  “Well, I guess they’re all in tonight,” the guy’s wife says. “And keep your voice down.”

  “All in?” says the guy. “Who’s there besides F———?”

  “K———,” she says. “They’re both there.”

  “Since when?” he says.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know her that well. I don’t know until it snows.”

  “That’s lovely,” he says. “A ménage de ménages.”

  F——— and K——— are two men anybody who follows popular music would have heard of. F———, the fellow’s wife tells me, lives with A———. You will have to excuse all these initials. K——— is an old boyfriend. As the fellow says, it is a funny ménage. It is funny to see the whole algebra of A———, F——— and K———, the night life of these gods of the entertainment world, whom one often reads about or sees in dark and arty photographs, summed up in a pile of boots in the hall outside somebody’s apartment in the East Seventies.

  I think of that pile of boots every time I get on the subject of what it is like to live in New York. I also think of Jason Robards in his rocker suit and Tuesday Weld rolling around nonplussed inside her silver fox, wondering if a courtly old man on 52nd Street is trying to make some esoteric, hermetic, hermitic, geriatric sport of her. Naturally, everybody refuses to be impre
ssed by the fact that New York is full of the rich, the great, the glamorous, the glorious. If you have any kind of luck at all, they exist chiefly as celebrities, stars, mandarins, magnates, which is to say, types, abstractions. And yet here they are, in the flesh. They keep turning up. This, after all, is where they come to dance for a while in quest of the big honeydew melon. This is where they pile up their boots and turn out the lights. And this fact—the fact that New York is the status capital of the United States, if not the whole hulking world—has curious effects on everybody who lives here. And by that I mean everybody, even people who are not in the game.

  The way to become a glamorous jewel thief in New York, for example, is to steal enough nickels from the honor-system cigar box on the newspaper stand outside the delicatessen to buy yourself four-fifths of a pint of half-and-half. Half-and-half is a drink bottled for the benefit of the winos, made of half sherry and half port, both of which are twenty per cent alcohol. After a bottle of half-and-half even some poor old muzzle-head who has been sitting on the sidewalk swabbing the lesions around his ankles with spit and a paper towel from the subway men’s room can work up the esprit to go into the Hotel Pierre, or some similarly elegant place, and go to work with the esoteric technique of jewel thievery. In most cases, this esoteric technique amounts to two pieces of information that a few twelve-year-olds on the street corner in Bedford-Stuyvesant may not be familiar with yet. One is how to open a snap lock with a strip of celluloid, like a pocket calendar from a bank, which takes about fifteen minutes to learn. The second is the knowledge that the wealthiest people in places like the Pierre live in corner suites on high floors. The rest is the dumb luck of urban demography.