The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

by Tom Wolfe

  “There are so many rich big shots living in New York,” Imrov is telling me, “that what happens is, the guy goes to one of these corner suites on a high floor, he don’t know who is living there, he’s got no idea at all, and he opens the door with the celluloid, takes the stuff and buys the paper in the morning and finds out he is a glamorous jewel thief. The place he hit turns out to be Jack Benny’s, Jerry Lewis’, Xavier Cugat’s, Linda Christian’s, Rosalind Russell’s or somebody like that.”

  Imrov is a puffy, adrenal little man I run into every now and then in Greenwich Village who bills himself as a professional jewel thief, only he is a realistic professional jewel thief, he tells me. I gather he likes to talk to me mainly because he knows I am a newspaper reporter. This means that Imrov is not only a typical New York jewel thief, which is to say, an egomaniac, but he also enjoys being a bona-fide New York cynic as well—a realist—looking out at the world with his cap tilted over one eye.

  Imrov’s analysis, however, is correct, I am informed by Inspector Raymond Maguire, who heads the Police Department’s anti-robbery work in Manhattan. In fact, by nightfall of the day the papers came out telling how a jewel thief robbed Jack Benny’s wife of $200,000, or something of the sort, the jewel thief not only believes that he is a glamorous jewel thief but also believes that he must have planned the job, as the newspapers insinuate, from beginning to end, calculating their every movement and picking the lock on their door with esoteric tools and the dulcet, long-practiced talents of a harp player. And let’s forget about the celluloid.

  “The trouble with a jewel thief,” the Inspector tells me, “is that he is dying to let somebody know that he is the genius who hit Jack Benny or Dolores Del Rio, or whoever it was, and sooner or later he is at a bar some night letting it be known that he is a much bigger man than everybody realizes. Their own ego is the best thing we’ve got going for us against them.”

  Once a jewel thief is brought into Maguire’s headquarters, at 400 Broome Street, there is usually no shutting the guy up. He is so grateful to be in the presence, at last, of a thoroughly understanding audience, with the fully technical knowledge of his problems, that he will replay his life in crime hour by hour, with bursts of rhetoric and every piece of jargon he can think of. The job of hearing them out usually falls to Lt. Robert McDermott. The high point comes if McDermott lets them demonstrate something on a set of mock-up locks he has. There in the ancient wood and plaster gloom of 400 Broome Street, it is like getting a concert hall at last for a fellow who is the glamorous jewel thief who hit a rich big shot in New York City.

  The story of the jewel thieves is really the parable of life in New York. New York more than any other city in the world probably is the city full of rich big shots—the rich, the powerful, the celebrated, the glamorous. That is only half the story, however. There, at the top, are the glamorosi locked in the battle for the big prizes and the status. And there, at the bottom, are millions of people, like the jewel thieves, through whom the status feeling is racing like a rogue hormone. Much of what is chalked off as New York’s rudeness, aggressiveness or impersonal treatment is in fact nothing more than some poor bastard convinced that he is in the “big league” town, trying to put a little extra spin on his delivery.

  A boy in a tweed coat and a rep tie who is in New York for the weekend from Hotchkiss, the prep school, is down in the men’s room of the Biltmore Hotel washing his hands at the basin, and an attendant in a gray orderly’s coat comes over and sticks a towel out toward him.

  The boy gives him a level look and says, “Will it cost me money?”

  The attendant gives him a level look and says, “No, I’m a ——— jerk. I work for nothing.”

  And so down there amid the button tiles, the white enamel, the perfume discs, the dime slots and the cascading flush, boy, this is the big league men’s room with no ——— jerks working for nothing.

  New York also has big league bums. I remember the first two bums who ever approached me in New York. It was down at Broadway and 18th Street one night. The first one, a stocky lout who didn’t look more than thirty-eight, came up and mumbled something, and I shook my head no, the usual, but he wouldn’t let up. He kept on coming and said, “I ain’t asking you for eighteen hundred dollars, for chrissake. I ain’t going off to Acapulco for the winter.” I started outwalking him, mulling over the way he had thrown in these specific details, the eighteen hundred dollars and Acapulco, after the manner of Wordsworth, who would be off in the middle of some lyric passage about the woods and the glades, God, Freedom and Immortality, when his glorious delicatessen owner’s love of minute inventory would overwhelm him and he could not help recording that the little girl who appeared on the bridge over the brook, a vision of love’s own nostalgia, was exactly seven and a half years old, or like Dickens, who—when this train of thought was broken by the second bum, an old scrime with a flaky face, who came up and asked me for something or other. This time I tried something that had always worked in Washington, D.C., when the winos climbed Meridian Hill. I threw my hands up and started talking in a gibberish approximation of French, like Danny Kaye in the old git-gat-gittle days, the idea being that I didn’t speak English and therefore didn’t know what he was saying. So the guy just stares at me for a moment and says, “O.K., since you’re a ——— foreigner who don’t speak English, then why don’t you go — — — — — — hat, you — — — —.”

  Well, he had me there. What could I do? Announce that I only understood the swear words? A real big league bum who had to let me know this town has the kind of bums you don’t put anything over on.

  The big league complex is also responsible for a lot of what strikes visitors to New York as gratuitous rudeness. I remember one day in the spring I was walking around Gramercy Park, which is an elaborate formal garden, one city block in size, surrounded by a tall, ornate iron fence, where Lexington Avenue hits 21st Street, and here was a young couple, very nice-looking, standing in front of Gramercy Park’s east gate. He had a camera around his neck and a big map in his hands, and she had a camera around her neck and a baby in her arms, and they were both trying to figure out Gramercy Park. Apparently here was this nice-looking park and they had tried to get in but none of the gates was open. What they didn’t know was that Gramercy Park is a private park, owned by the Gramercy Park Association and open only to certain people who live around it. Its usual population is nurses, nannies, mothers in Casual Shoppe tweeds who can’t afford nurses and nannies because of the $25,000 cash, raised by a personal loan at a cool 10 per cent that Daddy had to lay down for the co-op, and children, the children they wanted to be on Gramercy Park for, so they could play in it, surrounded by an iron spear fence, and convalescing dowagers taking the rays with lap robes from the old La Salle sedan days over their atrophying shanks. That is the place the young couple is puzzling over. As for them, they look like the kind of Swedish couple that turns up in the airline ads—good, wholesome, tan and windblown, except that she offers every promise of owning a pair of stretch slacks that live in all the secret fissures the Z-ad writers cannot offer a vocabulary for.

  From across the street a doorman at one of the big apartment houses on the park sees the man and his wife puzzling over the map and the park and walks across the street and says, “Can I help you folks?”

  This seems like a nice enough gesture, so the young man says, “Well, thank you. We just happened to notice this park, it’s a very lovely park, but the gates don’t seem to be open.”

  “Of course they’re not open,” says the doorman, as if he has not heard many more obvious remarks in his entire life.

  “What do you mean?” says the young man. “How do you get in?”

  “You get in if you have a key,” says the doorman.

  “A key?” says the young man.

  “It’s a pri-vate park,” says the doorman, in the tone of voice you spell out inane instructions to a child in.

  “I see,” says the young man. “Well,
couldn’t we just step inside for a minute and look around. We just happened to be walking by and it’s such a lovely park—”

  “What do you think we have rules for!” yells the doorman, suddenly opening up, as if a weakling young daddy with a large mortgage and no common sense has dragged him all the way out of his home and across the street to ask him a lot of simple-minded questions. “If we let everybody ‘just step inside for a minute,’ we might as well not have any rules! Right?”

  “Well, now, just a minute!” begins the young man, because after all, he is standing here in front of his wife and his child, being bullied around by a doorman.

  “Just a minute yourself!” says the doorman.

  So the poor guy’s baby starts to cry, and his wife is looking to him to for God’s sake solve this stupid situation, and he is trying to be firm and say, “Look—,” while the doorman says,

  “As a matter of fact, this is a good example of why we have rules!” And the baby is crying louder, and the girl is trying to quiet down the baby and some of the arteriosclerotic old denizens of Gramercy Park are shuffling their shanks and staring out through the iron fence with that look on the face intended to kill instantly all young people who can’t control their squalling children, or for that matter, all children, on a kind of lap-robe-genteel Herodian principle. The young guy, of course, is humiliated and he will spend the rest of the day taking it out in secret ways on his wife and his damnable kid for every comeback he didn’t think of to put the doorman in his place, and all the while, as the day goes up in smoke, he will not realize that the doorman was only doing the usual, being the big leaguer and walking a block, if that is what it takes, to set the outlanders straight.

  The secret vice of New York cab drivers is the same thing. They all secretly relish New York traffic. They consider it the most big league traffic in the world. By god, we navigate big league traffic. That is behind half the yelling they do. It explains their unflagging, unbeatable boorishness. They all believe that this is real big league traffic and everyone but big leaguers should stay the hell out of it, they have no business there. I can remember a cab driver who had a couple of people in his cab, who were presumably going some place, pulling up right behind a woman who was stranded in the middle of traffic at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, a very well-dressed, elderly woman, rather frightened, naturally, and leaning out and yelling at her, right behind her aging mastoids:

  “Hey! Jackass!”

  The woman ignored him, but he didn’t pull off. He yelled it again: “Hey! Jackass!”

  She still didn’t flinch, so he yelled it again, just sitting there in the middle of traffic himself: “Hey! Jackass!”

  She didn’t turn around so he said it again: “Hey! Jackass!”

  And she didn’t turn around, so he kept on saying it: “Hey! Jackass! Hey! Jackass! Hey! Jackass! Hey! Jackass!” all the time in the loudest voice you can imagine, the kind of voice cab drivers develop from yelling from way back in the throat and enriching and compacting the sound with phlegm, rheum, tobacco scum, guinea grinders, cheese Danishes, grease-soaked knishes, tooth decay, flat beer, constipation and sinus snufflings: “Hey! Jackass!”

  Finally, the woman can’t stand it anymore, and she wheels around, furious, she doesn’t care which way cars are coming from at this point, and as soon as she does, the cabbie sticks his face squarely in hers and yells, “Hey! Jackass! Look where you’re going! Jackass!” and then guns off in first gear, letting her have a good, soggy, liquid spray of exhaust across the knees. This is big league traffic, lady.

  The curious thing is, however, that there is still a genre of intellectuals, serious writers even, who talk about New York’s cab drivers and dirt, the foul air, the overcrowding, the noise, the rudeness, and all the rest of it, and say that, you know, in spite of all that it all adds up to “magic.” They really still use words like “magic” and tell how stimulating it all is. The “magic” and the similar euphemisms that crop up in this connection, like 19th-century perennials, are really unconscious translations of the word “status.” There is a hell of a lot of magic in New York as long as you’re riding high and can drink two Scotches-on-the-rocks before dinner and look out at the city lights while your blood rises up into your nice, pellucid 1930’s Manhattan Tower brain like charged-water bubbles: It is Pavlov and not Freud who has had something to say about New York City. It is as if New York were operating on a pleasure principle like that which was discovered, darkly, when they imbedded an electrode in the dog’s brain and it hit some unknown pleasure center. He could turn on the impulse and feel the mysterious sensation by hitting a pedal with his foot, which he began doing over and over again. This brain center had nothing to do with any of the conventional senses. They could place bowls full of food before him and lead bitches in heat before him, and he never showed the slightest inclination to budge from the pedal. He just kept hitting it, over and over, not sleeping, not eating, until the strain of exhaustion and starvation became too much and he keeled over, his last gesture being a feeble push with his paw toward the pedal, which stirred up the mysterious pleasure beyond the senses by a simple, direct impulse to the brain.

  The pleasures of status, the impulses of status striving, seem almost to have that sort of physical basis in New York.

  For example, there are people who do not ride the subways, or do not want it known that they ride the subways and develop twitches and cringes on the subject. It is a point of social standing with them. There are men in New York who ride the subways but do not want it generally known and cringe when they pull out a pocketful of change and other people can see that along with the other change, there are subway tokens. There is no one around who ever heard of them, but they cringe anyway. The impulse is that the subways are for proles, and people of status travel only by cab, or perhaps once in a great while by bus.

  I can remember a scene in the Artist & Writers Restaurant, on West 40th Street, when one of the fashion magazines sent a team in to shoot a fashion shot. “Team” is only the convenient word; it was really more like a cast. There were about twelve people. The photographer was a little guy in a hairy gray kimono-style over-coat, no buttons and a sash belt, chalk-stripe pants, orange stripes on blue, like a Gulf Station attendant’s, only cut “continental.” He had two helpers, both zombie-like men in black who carried his equipment or something. There was the model, who lounged back against the bar, and she had what seemed to be two ladies-in-waiting and one keeper. In addition there was a major editor from the magazine, a fashion editor and two or three satraps, little girls from Sarah Lawrence, still in sweaters, skirts and buttercup blouses. It had been snowing that day and they were all late. The photographer looked around the premises, then closed his eyes and said in a kind of huge stage whisper: “No!”

  “What do you mean?” somebody said.

  “What do you mean?” somebody else said.

  “It won’t do!” said the photographer, looking straight ahead.

  “Why not?” somebody said.

  “It won’t do,” said the photographer.

  “What do you mean?” somebody else said.

  “I said it won’t do,” said the photographer. “The decision is up to me and I say it won’t do.”

  Meantime, I was standing around and I introduced myself to the model. She just nodded.

  “What is your name?” I said.

  “Ravena,” she said.

  “Ravena what?” I said.

  “Ravena,” she said.

  “Ravena what?” I said.

  “Ravena’s enough,” she said.

  “Ravena Zenuf,” I said, on the grounds that that was quite a name.

  She just turned up her lips in that bored way some girls have, then let them drop.

  Just then the decision was announced, the decision that the place wouldn’t do.

  “How am I gonna get back?” said Ravena. “It took us an hour to get over here.”

  “Why don’t you take the subway?”
I said. And then, just that one time, I got an answer out of Ravena.

  “The subway! Are you kidding?”

  “You can catch it right up the street, the shuttle, and it’ll take you across town in no time.”

  “I don’t ride no subways!” said Ravena.

  “Why not?”

  “Down deh wid dose Puerto Ricans and creeps?” said Ravena. “Are you kidding!”

  In a way, of course, the subway is the living symbol of all that adds up to lack of status in New York. There is a sense of madness and disorientation at almost every express stop. The ceilings are low, the vistas are long, there are no landmarks, the lighting is an eerie blend of fluorescent tubing, electric light bulbs and neon advertising. The whole place is a gross assault on the senses. The noise of the trains stopping or rounding curves has a high-pitched harshness that is difficult to describe. People feel no qualms about pushing whenever it becomes crowded. Your tactile sense takes a crucifying you never dreamed possible. The odors become unbearable when the weather is warm. Between platforms, record shops broadcast 45 r.p.m. records with metallic tones and lunch counters serve the kind of hot dogs in which you bite through a tensile, rubbery surface and then hit a soft, oleaginous center like cottonseed meal, and the customers sit there with pastry and bread flakes caked around their mouths, belching to themselves so that their cheeks pop out flatulently now and then.

  The underground spaces seem to attract every eccentric passion. A small and ancient man with a Bible, an American flag and a megaphone haunts the subways of Manhattan. He opens the Bible and quotes from it in a strong but old and monotonous voice. He uses the megaphone at express stops, where the noise is too great for his voice to be heard ordinarily, and calls for redemption.

  Also beggars. And among the beggars New York’s status competition is renewed, there in the much-despised subway. On the Seventh Avenue IRT line the competition is maniacal. Some evenings the beggars ricochet off one another between stops, calling one another ———s and ———s and telling each other to go find their own ——— car. A mere blind man with a cane and a cup is mediocre business. What is demanded is entertainment. Two boys, one of them with a bongo drum, get on and the big boy, with the drum, starts beating on it as soon as the train starts up, and the little boy goes into what passes for a native dance. Then, if there is room, he goes into a tumbling act. He runs from one end of the car, first in the direction the train is going, and does a complete somersault in the air, landing on his feet. Then he runs back the other way and does a somersault in the air, only this time against the motion of the train. He does this several times both ways, doing some native dancing in between. This act takes so long that it can be done properly only over a long stretch, such as the run between 42nd Street and 72nd Street. After the act is over, the boys pass along the car with Dixie cups, asking for contributions.