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 cheekbones. 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 impressed 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.
“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 burn, 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
burn 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 21 st 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 overcoat, 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.
The Dixie cup is the conventional
container. There is one young Negro on the Seventh Avenue line who
used to get on at 42nd Street and start singing a song, “I Wish
That I Were Married.” He was young and looked perfectly healthy.
But he would get on and sing this song, “I Wish That I Were
Married,” at the top of his lungs and then pull a Dixie cup out
from under the windbreaker he always wore and walk up and down the
car waiting for contributions. I never saw him get a cent. Lately,
however, life has improved for him because he has begun to
understand status competition. Now he gets on and sings “I Wish
That I Were Married,” only when he opens up his windbreaker, he not
only takes out a Dixie cup but reveals a cardboard sign, on which
is written: “MY MOTHER HAS MULTIPLE SCHLERROSSIS AND I AM BLIND IN
ONE EYE.” His best touch is sclerosis, which he has added every
conceivable consonant to, creating a good, intimidating German
physiology-textbook solidity. So today he does much better. He
seems to make a living. He is no idler, lollygagger or burn. He can
look with condescension upon the states to which men
fall.
On the East Side IRT subway line, for
example, at 86th Street, the train stops and everyone comes
squeezing out of the cars in clots and there on a bench in the
gray-green gloom, under the girders and 1905 tiles, is an old man
slouched back fast asleep, wearing a cotton windbreaker with the
sleeves pulled off. That is all he is wearing. His skin is the
color of congealed Wheatena laced with pocket lint. His legs are
crossed in a gentlemanly fashion and his kindly juice-head face is
slopped over on the back of the bench. Apparently, other winos, who
are notorious thieves among one another, had stripped him of all
his clothes except his windbreaker, which they had tried to pull
off him, but only managed to rip the sleeves off, and left him
there passed out on the bench and naked, but in a gentlemanly
posture. Everyone stares at him briefly, at his congealed
Wheatena-and-lint carcass, but no one breaks stride; and who knows
how long it will be before finally two policemen have to come in
and hold their breath and scrape him up out of the gloom and into
the bosom of the law, from which he will emerge with a set of green
fatigues, at least, and an honorable seat at night on the subway
bench.
The unfortunate thing is that a nekkid
old wino on a subway bench is not even a colorful sight, or
magical. It is something worth missing altogether, and in fact much
of the status symbolism of New York grows out of the ways the rich
and the striving manage to insulate themselves, physically, from
the lower depths. They live up high to escape the dirt and the
noise. They live on the corners to get the air. And on Monday
nights they go to the Metropolitan Opera in
limousines.
Up to the Broadway and the 39th Street
entrances roll the limousines and out debouch the linked and the
lacquered, as Wallace Stevens used to say, and then, as no one ever
notices, the limousines pull off. The chauffeurs have to go
somewhere, after all, while their people, as they call them, go
settling down, like animated Lalique, into the Parterre Boxes and
the Dress Circle, for two, three, even four hours of opera. So the
chauffeurs have developed an opera-night social life of their own.
They drive across 39th Street, over to Eighth Avenue, and then turn
back up 40th, between Eighth and Seventh. There may be as many as
fifty limousines heading for the block. There is a mounted
policeman with nothing to do but wait for them. At 7:30 he raises
his right hand as the signal, and the chauffeurs can start lining
up on either side. In a few minutes the neon signs of the London
Tavern, a set ‘em-up and hook-’em-down saloon near the corner, are
flooding in splendid orange pools on the grilles, hoods, and Art
Nouveau radiator caps of Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs, and the lineup
of limousines begins to stretch all the way to Eighth
Avenue.
The chauffeurs, after all, come to the
opera as often as their employers, and so it is a social thing for
them, too. By 8 P.M. in their black coats, black ties, black
visored caps, they are already standing around in groups on the
sidewalk, and by 8:30 the first groups head for Bickford’s
Cafeteria. Someone has to stay behind to watch the automobiles.
They end up tooling in and out of Bickford’s in shifts. They sit
down at the Formica tops and drink coffee and talk about opera,
among other things.
“Germans!” Leland, who drives for
Mrs.————, tells me. “Richard Strauss. They won’t let out until
11:45.”
“Strauss isn’t so bad,” says a friend
of Leland’s, a very old and apoplectic-looking chauffeur who
doesn’t shave very well.
“It’s only Der
Rosenkavalier;” Frank, Mr. P————’s man, tells me. “The rest
of the time”—he shrugs—“Strauss is O.K. Wagner is the holy
terror.”
“You’re not kidding now.”
“Wagner!”
“Give me the Italians,” Leland
says.
“Puccini!”
“Right!”
“Tosca.”
“Tosca?” I
say.
“Yes,” says Leland. “Tosca lets out about 10:30.”
“I’ve been to Tosca when it lasted to 11:15,” says a younger
chauffeur, an earnest man with a great head of straight black hair,
but no one pays any attention to him. He drives Carey Cadillacs,
rented by opera-goers who do not have limousines of their
own.
“The Italians I can live with,” Leland
announces, and they all nod over the heavy-duty ochre chinaware and
the Formica tops.
Jason Robards, Tuesday Weld, the
ménage à trois, celebrity-style—and now chauffeurs who sit in
Bickford’s Cafeteria discussing opera and cutting the Carey crowd.
All that New York needs is simpler people.
Hugh Troy eased the situation a little.
Hugh Troy, the artist and children’s book author, got one of the
cab drivers who has an exposition to make.
“It’s a hot day for the middle of
February!” says the cab driver.
“Yes, it is,” Hugh Troy
says.
“You know,” the cab driver says, “they
say the earth’s skin is slipping, and right now New York is right
over where Savannah, Georgia, used to be. The whole skin is
slipping.”
Hugh Troy thinks that over a second and
says, “It must be getting very baggy.”
“Baggy?” says the cab
driver.
“You know—baggy down around the South
Pole.”
The cab driver thinks that over a while
and never does go on with his exposition of how the earth’s skin is
slipping.
“Baggy,” Hugh Troy says to himself,
“down around the South Pole.”
Well, Hugh Troy has taken one big
leaguer out of the action—but there are so many millions to
go.