City of God (38 page)

What were the chances for any of us, what odds would you have given? Me, flexing my arm, show you my number-six-linguine bicep, or Vinnie who we call Slapsy because his brain works as if he's been
decked once too often, or maybe the stolid Mario who is called Brick or Shithouse because he is built like a brick shithouse, or Aaron aka Jewish, an alien from outside the neighborhood who hangs out with us because he likes our raucous Italian ways. I mean, the wit here is not of the playing fields of Eton. We filled our snowballs with rocks. We sang the hits on the corner in front of the candy store.

Jewish, whose father runs numbers, has the scratch for our trips to the Union City matinees, he is in training for the rackets, Jewish, a sometime substitute bagman practicing his padrone-ship, though deficient in the crucial gift of self-importance, a terrible lack that means he will never make it in the wiseguy world. Besides, he has a touch of palsy it must be, one foot the toe drags, the heel doesn't quite meet the ground. Gives him an unbalanced stride, like someone about to lift off. Threadbare corduroys and sneakers winter and summer and shirttails flying as he went down his runway. A sweet goony kid, an eager expression, mouth a perpetual smile, big front teeth. And to top everything, this silly high-pitched bray verging on the maniacal, and it was an embarrassment there in the cavernous theater of dreams, so loud and piercing that the stripper twirling her tasseled tits and bumping and grinding her ass to the drumbeat would actually stop what she was doing under the lights and glare in our direction.

Once a week, the bus to Union City. A woman of a late childbearing age marching around a stage under a pink light. Jewish braying, Mario punching my arm at a particularly exquisite moment of the choreography, Slapsy muttering holy shit over and over again in a display of his powers of articulation, and I sink down in my seat suffering a complex and not remotely pleasurable excitement. I actually worry that she will see me watching, the stripper. There is such female contempt coming off that stage. And swinging her ass so expertly, ba-da boom, ba-da boom—well it was of a vulgarity, believe me, that in all my years of saloon life, and the indulgence of women, I have never seen topped. This was a low-down dirty use of pulchritude, confirmed by the cretin in the checked suit and floppy shoes and derby who staggers from the wings with a three-foot pink rubber prong sticking out of his pants. At the same time of my case of nauseatingly aching balls, I am angry at the fat dancing slut's representation of the abilities of women. I didn't want it to be that way.

Another one who got to me, a vapid skinny stripper as slender and
titless as a boy, who drifted across the stage in such a drug-induced torpor not even Buddy Rich could have kept time.

How did I get onto this? Why am I thinking of this? Maybe—and I am after the fact by some seventy years—maybe I believed what went on in a theater should be different from the street. I don't pretend the boy I was could think it through. This nothing kid, who would not finish two years of high school, tries to harmonize with the other Fools on the street corner—he decides performance is another realm? What the fuck did I know about show business to think it should give you something you couldn't find outside? But by Christ I swear that is exactly the conviction that came to me, like I was a student of the performing arts, poo-poo pa-doop, and where it came from I will never know.

So in the same custom we have of thanking this one or that one in the awards ceremonies, I thank Jewish for helping me perceive, by way of its negating sleaze, my own way out. His way out, incidentally, I won't go into here, except that it was abrupt and premature, my poor Achilles-tendoned pal.

But in the meantime I am trying, right? Always, no matter how confused, navigating by my sight of the alabaster city. How much better for me if I was shy like in the song, if I only shyly imagined kissing Angela Morelli under the boardwalk in Asbury Park. Slipping my hand under her wool bathing suit. I can't be your girlfriend anymore, she says. It's not that I don't like you, I do, but I can't take the chance something happens and that's my life. I want to do something with my life. Dark eyes shining, a wonderful serious girl. She pushes my hand away: You got no prospects. No job. You quit school. Don't you want to make something of yourself? It's like you got no self-respect, hanging out on the corner singing stupid songs with those others have nothing better to do. So what are you crying, Angela, if I'm the one with no self-respect—and what else does your mother say? It's not just my mother says that, I got eyes that see for myself you don't do nothing. I got ears that don't hear about no ambitions of yours.

No ambitions, Angela, no ambitions? I had the ambition to fuck you, shouldn't that have been enough? I had the ambition to fuck you and the world with you!

So, now you think you know who's the song?

He smokes three-for-a-penny cigarettes, works on his pompadour
in the bathroom and, like the little girl said, leads the Fools in the latest hits in front of the candy store:
I wanna be loved by you, just you, and nobody else but you. I wanna be loved by you a-lone, poo-poo pa-doop.

First career move, an act of self-distinction, to go solo. Brick, my man, you got a tin ear, why don't you give up, go punch a door or something. And you, Slapsy, you can't even remember the fuckin words. Words are the song, asshole, they are the meaning of the notes, they are what the fuckin song is about. Riding them like that, killing their joy, which was to croak the tunes of our culture on the street corner, stick it to the old world cockers upstairs: Here we are do me something. Killing all that, killing the Fools of Song forever. Whatayou the director all of a sudden? You think you know everything, who made you the leader. You guys are shit, you don't know how to sing. Maybe not but I can bust your fuckin face. So I throw myself at Shithouse, the only way, hoping they pull us apart before he snaps me in two.

So that's the end of that, I'm alone, only Slapsy hangs in there, follows me around, does things for me, cops a Philco radio and gives it to me, that kind of thing. And he's been with me since, all these years, not too much upstairs, but loyal unto death. What I like. We have grown up together, my life an epic of change, his always the same, narrowly fixed on me, my personality, my career, I fill his mind. A very narrow bandwidth, old Slaps. If he were a wife, I would have dumped him long ago. He got out of there, though, didn't he, on my coattails, but out is out and who will say he could have any other way? Peculiar way to live, though. When anything good comes along, an honor, an album makes platinum, medal from the president, whatever, Slapsy likes to think it's happened to both of us. This calls for a drink, boss, we deserve it, we are the best!

But don't take it too hard, Slaps—you know I love you.

Paul Whiteman is who I hear on the Philco, tuned in low late at night with my ear to the cloth, and Rudy Vallee, and Russ Columbo and Jack Leonard. Picked up stations as far away as Pittsburgh, Billy Wynne and his orchestra playing the Pocono Room at the Three Rivers Hotel. It was not just music, it was class.
Here is the Drag, See how it goes; Down on the heels, Up on the toes. That's the way to do the Varsity Drag.
Rudy Vallee a Yale man which he somehow always let
you know. Jolson, a good voice but he oversold everything he sang. He was not it, Jolson. Cantor, beneath contempt, a clown, no music in him at all. I didn't like comedians who also sang. I wanted singers who were serious about what they did. I wanted performers to be purely who they were and nothing else. Style was what I listened for, elegance, a good lyric connoting taste and showing wit. You understand, by such homemade discriminations this punk of nothingness from New Jersey was instructing himself. I copied down the Gershwin songs, the brother's lyrics, kept a notebook, he was the pinnacle for me, George, high style, sophistication, no idea he came out of the Lower East Side, a little Hebe kid no more to the manor born than I.

My serious singing was alone on the dock, bringing the voice through the nasal passage, testing it, hearing it, finding it, all the while looking at the city across the river, singing to it with the resonance I could hear in my skull, my thick skull. I wanted to hang my voice on the city of white stone, weave my voice line by line up and down back and forth, wrap the whole fucking city inside my voice. And now you know it, don't you? The song is you, big town, you were always my song across the oily wide river, the gulls riding the wind, dropping the crab shells at my feet, the black men fishing with eternal patience off the end of the dock for a decent meal.

Another year before I would actually get on the ferry a block away and make it across. Paying for it with a messenger-boy day job in Newark. And the island of Manhattan rising up before me as a human place, coming into focus: liners at the piers, smoke from stacks, smells of the West Side stockyards. Down the ramp and into the life. Horns, lights, streetcars, buses, trucks, police whistles, the flow of mayhem. Who had organized it, how did they make it work? How people knew which door to enter. How they found themselves at home in buildings forty floors off the ground. I walked the streets wanting to hug the lampposts. Sopped up the noise, the important noise of the city. Studying the way people walked, the figures that caught my eye, male and female, their clothes. People of all walks pooling at the lights. Horses still clopping along then. Like a scientist, experiment, take a cab, tell him where you want to go, pay the fare and the right tip, without giving it away what a rube you are. Take a look at some of those hotels where the bands played. Get the confidence to walk in of an evening, sit at the bar with your cigarettes, and look old enough.
Watch the band, picking up on the sense among them of their control of the room, their inner circle of performing knowingness.

All of that, without its being mine. I am still this punk kid staring in the store windows. But I swore somehow I would bring it down, seduce it, conquer it. How? With the lyrics of romance! I would use the common coin, the pop tune. Can you beat it? All the enfranchisement in the world, the education, the genius, the power and politics and money, and—what?—this kid like that story of the juggler, I would sing my heart out if I would ever learn to sing, and the Blessed Virgin herself would come down in full color from her marble pedestal and wipe my sweaty brow with the hem of her robe. Did I know there was enough longing in the world to make it work? Callow, I was a callow kid, so insular in my dreamt Manhattan while the world was blowing apart, Nazis goose-stepping, tearing Jews from their homes, Stalin icing millions in the gulags, the Japs practicing beheading techniques on Chinese coolies, the Burmese with their loaded carts jamming the roads out of Rangoon, Italians dive-bombing the Ethiopes waving their spears at the sky, whole fucking world showing its true humanity, screaming baby on the railroad track, blood pouring down the mountains, irrigating the deserts, reddening the seas, the world a big bloody circus of human mutilation, with a degree of murderous, insane rage to blast the planet off its axis. . . and here I am crooning in bel canto:

Why can't I let her know the song my heart would
sing

What beautiful rhapsody of love and youth and
spring

The music is sweet, the words are true. . .

The song is you!

(
tearful shouting loving standing ovation
)

—Ex-
Times
guy, now a self-certified killer, is holding his head up a bit more these days. Less slouchy, doesn't look at the ground as he walks, shoulders not so rounded. You can tell if a man's been defeated in this
world by the way he walks in the streets of the city. There are a thousand walks of defeat, each one tailored to a specific morphology, but all very clearly what they are. Ex-
Times
guy now elevated out of the shuffling class of the disgruntled, unappreciated, betrayed, embittered, or catatonic. It's not that he has forgotten the accident factor in his closure of the S.S. sergeant's story, but he has worked it out to his credit: He thinks now he had seen the old Nazi killer from the corner of his eye and recognized him before he lost control of his bicycle and bounced up on the sidewalk and ran him over. He thinks now his body took control of his mind, there was a conflict resolved by the reversal of control systems wherein not his conscious thought was the directing intelligence but the electric buildup of intent in his skeletal and musculature systems. He had crossed over, gone right through the transom of his freedom, how beautiful that the moment could be so explicit.

Ex-
Times
guy feels now there's nothing he can't do, nothing too bold, too outrageous for his contemplation. Has his hair trimmed short, works out in the gym, buys some new, well-tailored outfits. This shlumperer of the past sixty years is now, if not elegant, at least sartorially passable. Finds himself a woman to treat with manly inconsideration. She is a publisher's copy editor in her forties, a thin little blond woman with whom he has in common prescriptive views of grammatical usage and loyalty to the old Second Edition of Webster's Unabridged. But beyond that she exhibits a disappointing gullibility when he fantasizes over dinner now and then and alludes to mysterious professional affiliations.