Great Kisser (24 page)

“During the day Stanley had told me, ‘If Rosie gets out of line, this is what you do.' I said to him, ‘What do you mean, “out of line?” He said, ‘If she starts growling …' I said, ‘What do you mean specifically?' He said, ‘Here's what you do.' He smacked her with his open hand right against the nose, and she put her head down. He said, ‘You see these scars on my face, Hymie? I took all these scars to get me to this point. But I got a lock now.'

“So I introduced Rosie. The place was packed. 800 people. The fire commissioner and the police chief were there. She enters. She goes on her tricycle. And I announced, ‘Rosie, daughter of Kong!' She was four feet off the ground and then she's standing up on the fucking tricycle. Unbelievable the way she rode this tricycle.

“I mean it was awesome. And then we finished that, took the bike away. And she went out on her rollerskates. She comes down to doing the twist. Now Lolita Brown was the only stripper on stage. And she was heavily endowed. Like 38C's, I'd guess. She was wearing a brassiere. Nice ladies wore them then. Okay, now Lolly's leaning over toward Rosie, and Rosie's doing the twist. And one of her fucking nails, like four inches long, hooks into Lolita's bra and Lolly is frozen. Frozen, just frozen!And I start to hear a rumble come out of this fucking bear. I look out into the audience for Stanley and can't see nothing because of the lights. I'm yelling, ‘Stanley, Stanley!' All I hear is his voice and he's yelling out: ‘Hit her like I taught you! Hit her like I taught you!” Well, I wasn't thinking about an open slap, because I'm not an open slapper. I'm a puncher. I punched this fucking bear in the nose. And this fucking bear put her head right down. I took the claw out of Lolita's bra. I pushed her back gently and said, ‘Get off the stage.'

“This bear started pissing, which I didn't know at the time. And I marched her off the stage. She's standing up on her hind legs. Way in the back was the entrance. I gotta get to that entrance. And Stanley's calling, ‘Keep coming! Keep coming!' We got outside. He had the ramp up on the truck but the gate was down. Then he took her and my legs started shaking like a goddamn vibrating machine.

“He lifted the gate. When she went in, she whirled around, man, she came at that gate and me ferociously. She was hollering and yelling and growling, her teeth bared. Stanley said, ‘You did good. You did good, but I told you to slap her.'”

II

That night Hymie told me how he got involved in the world of “certain important individuals” like Frank Costello. “I ran another club in Jersey with Pete the Hat,” Hymie said. “All the guys came in and I met them all, the Jersey contingency of the same crew from East 101st Street in Manhattan. Same umbrella. Pete hung out at the Pompeii Room in Manhattan. So the Pompeii Room was the creme de la creme. Very plush place. No guys on the bottom were there. All heavyweights. That's when I came to realize that the guy from Jersey and the guys from New York were all in one family: one big happy family. That's when I sat with Frank Costello and gave him my idea to do a movie about Meyer Lansky. Frank said do a letter with a proposal and he'll give it to Jimmy Blue Eyes. Jimmy Blue eyes brought the proposal to Meyer and no answer came back, which is an answer in itself.

“So years later, I'm on a plane and find myself sitting next to Jimmy Blue Eyes. I never seen him since that one time. So I didn't want him to think I was a plant. So I says, ‘Jimmy, I just want to show you I'm not an agent.' He looked at me. I says, ‘I gotta tell you a story. So you know I'm not bullshitting you.' So I told him about the thing for Meyer. Then he smiled, because he knew. He remembered that clearly. We started talking. I said, ‘Look, your eyes aren't blue.' He says, ‘You're right.' So I says to him, ‘You want to tell me?' He says okay. ‘When I was a kid, I was like an amateur fighter. They overmatched me with a guy; he kicked the shit out of me. My eyes were black and blue. And I went back to this soda fountain, the place I used to hang out, all the guys and dolls, and one of the girls hung a moniker on me, Jimmy Blue Eyes. And it stuck.'”

Hymie then introduced me to his best friend, Mario, from East 102nd Street. They hung together in Mario's hotel room off Times Square. Mario was seventy and he was six feet four. His shoe size was 16. His father was the champion eater for the mob. They would place bets on how much he could eat. Damon Runyon wrote about him. “There was a lunch with 22 pounds of spaghetti for the whole crew,” Mario recalled. “When my father ate it all, they rushed him to the hospital. The doctor says in Italian, it's coming out of his ass. It reminded him of grinding meat in a machine. Another time my father was eating seven steaks; the other guy was chewing the fat and the bread. My father was grabbing the fat and the bread from him.

“The guys hit my father a mickey. They would nail the toilets shut with spikes from the hallways, but he shit all over the street. They threw a big hotdog-and-beer party. All you could eat for a dollar in them days. They said make sure my father don't get a ticket. But the bookie sneaked my father a ticket anyway. Afterwards my father ran into the house to get into the toilets in the hallways. They had nailed them down. So he jumped on the washbasin and broke it and shat all over the house.”

Hymie's eyes twinkled. “Oh yeah,” he said.

Bukowski wrote, “it's the dead who rule the world.” And I'm thinking, Hymie had broken the larynx of a robber who shot him. Well, he was entitled to do that. But he bullied the helpless. He stole, cheated and killed. He bought women. He had a rack on his farm to torture them a little.

So why was he so obviously superior to me?

III

He'd argued a copyright law case before the Supreme Court and he won. They named it after him. He'd hung out at the Peppermint Lounge with Joey Dee and the Starlighters when the twist was a craze and at Sardi's and the Copacabana when they were the meccas of Broadway. He was a great storyteller. He headed a powerful literary foundation. He obtained money for the heirs of the great writers, keeping his huge cut. He represented the most beautiful literature ever written, held it in his filthy hands. He hung with Harry Cohn and Orson Welles and William Faulkner.

He was a player. He knew something essential about reality that I did not. He didn't know or understand what I did. But I didn't—couldn't even imagine—what he knew, that iron-trap mind of his. What did he know that I didn't know? Everything! That was the problem.

And he was a bridge to another time, a time of O'Neill and Williams and Sherwood Anderson, a time when these manuscripts meant something. But not to him, of course. He didn't know what was so hot about them.

It was the juxtaposition of the dirt and the art.

And he radiated protection. He could pick up the phone and solve your thorniest problems. I thought of compiling an enemies list to show him and pushed the thought aside.

He knew how the world ran. He knew the secret. On 42nd Street, the armpit of the universe, amid the porno shops, the killers, the beggars, the pimps, the hookers, he opened the manhole cover, picked up the filthy round black metal, sewage water streaming down the sides of it, beckoned to me, and he said: “Here it is. The answer you can't find in your books or the Bowery Poetry club. Go down into it like I went into that fireroom and shoveled coal. Get burned, Michael. You'll come out a piece of garbage, a fucking asshole. But you'll finally be a man.”

“Who says that I'm not?” I screamed at him.

Hymie laughed. It wasn't worth discussing.

IV

Hymie and I were not getting along. He was abusive. He looked at me and said, “Only a mother could love that face.” Later on he decided to flatter me: “You look handsome today, kid.” I agreed with him, but knew he was, in his own language, “buttering my ass.”

He might be a Jewish “made man” and I was not made at all. I had spent my life standing in front of the houses of women I yearned for, waiting at the gate, a soulful gaze on my face.

The fronts of the houses were as far as I penetrated.

I had a contract “of human decency,” as I called it, drawn up for Hymie to sign in which he would agree not to call me a “little elf,” “toad,” “Hebe,” or “poof.” Wouldn't be mean to me. Would recognize that all people are part of “the family of man.” Hymie laughed when I showed it to him. “I ain't signin' nothing,” he said.

I stuck it out with him because I wanted this story. This was my courage.

V

Hymie sent me to see his cousin, Roberta, a hot number, “just out of the joint,” to gather more information about him for my screenplay. I got dizzy listening to her, and didn't know how much of this shit was true. “My father ran guns for the CIA, for Cuba,” she said, “and I know that Hymie was involved with him for naval intelligence. Heavy duty, because there was in-camera testimony and afterwards they read Hymie his rights during my federal trial.

“I had been with my Dad under a tank in Beirut six months before he was killed by my mother. My father was an operative for the CIA and had been in the Mossad for twenty years. He was one of the guys with the Irgun who blew up the King David Hotel after he was liberated from Dachau.

“I understood Hymie because of my father. Nobody else could stand him. Hymie will test you. Throw things at you out of left field. Hymie and my father could look at each other and know what was going on. They were perfectly in sync. Two men of steel. Hunting down Mengele was a passion for them, and Eichmann. They had big-time involvement. They went jaguar hunting, they went on CIA missions in Honduras when I was like seven. Deep in the jungles. My Dad was captured at the Bay of Pigs. He was with British intelligence at the time. He was supposed to be executed by the Cubans. He had a death sentence for December 31st. But the guards were drinking in Havana. My Dad grabbed a grenade off the guy, and blew out of the prison. He made it to the beach, escaped, got back to London. When my father got shot, or Hymie got shot, they were always there for each other.

“Under my house I had ten thousand gallons of diesel fuel. That was because if there was ever any emergency, the Coast Guard knew they could always refuel at my father's house. I grew up with Hymie, my father and Meyer Lansky. I have Meyer's
shabbus
candlesticks in my house. My father was killed by my mother. It was chaos and mass confusion. Hymie flew in the night my father was killed. There were police and agents. Hymie was like, ‘You can handle it, kid.'

“I went to prison at 17,” Roberta said. “Hymie was visiting us. We're sitting in the kitchen. Over the wall, SWAT teams from everywhere. Like right out of ‘Miami Vice.' Helicopters. Army explosives people, tanks. Hymie answers the door. They say, ‘We have a warrant for the arrest—' and Hymie says, ‘Oh shit, they got me.' But the arrest warrant was for me. I got arrested that night on federal firearms charges for hand grenades, machine guns, tanks, rockets—all that stuff that was buried in the ground by my father.”

VI

On a Saturday afternoon I'm with Hymie again and he tells me about the time he told a woman that Sinatra wanted to have sex with her. “The girl was about six three, a nurse,” Hymie recalled. “Crazy about Sinatra. She was told Frank wanted to fool around, but to be with him she had to be blindfolded. And she did it. She had three blindfolds on. And about four guys banged her. She was told the rules: she could talk, but he wouldn't talk back to her. When it was over, she thought she got the greatest fuck in the world. She was happy as a pig in shit. I had one bedroom that had wall-to-wall mattresses. Three king size mattresses. So eighteen feet of mattresses. Those were the days, my friend. We thought they'd never end.”

In the taxi, Hymie told the Jamaican cab driver, “Drive faster, nigger, or I'll turn you in as a miscreant. You know what that is?” The driver squirmed in his seat. “You don't talk to me like that. I'm a human being.”

“Watch the road, nigger, or I'll carve you a new asshole and shove your green card up it. All I gotta do is make one phone call.”

Hymie's voice was cold and threatening—the raw face of power. No civil rights revolution, none of that bullshit for him. Stripped of veneer, this was the real deal, the vicious undertow of America.

The driver, in turmoil, went through a red light, and a police car appeared instantly. The cop pulled the cab over and said to the driver, “You wait here. Don't move.”

Hymie and I got out of the cab and looked for another on the crowded Times Square street. Ten minutes passed. We couldn't find one, and the police, busy with other duties, hadn't returned to the Jamaican driver's cab. Hymie noted that the forgotten Jamaican was starting up the cab, and he hurried over to a police car and alerted them the driver was about to take off. The policeman headed off the cab as it began to move; flashing lights exploded all over the cab.

Hymie and I watched as the cab was derailed. A bunch of policemen surrounded it. We heard a commotion. The cab was shaking from side to side, as the driver pounded the steering wheel with hopeless rage. I looked at Hymie's triumphant little smile. Oh yeah, this night was turning out sweet.

Later, in his office, when I protested how he acted with blacks, he said, “Yeah, but you don't understand. I ain't no bigot. There's prejudice and there's bigotry. There's a big fucking difference. I ain't a bigot, see. I'm just right about them. I know what they're like. That's why I'm prejudiced. But no bigotry is to be inferred.”

Changing the subject, Hymie said, “Did I tell you about the Vatican ring? A friend of mine left a ring at my place from the Papal ring collection of the Vatican. It had been missing for centuries. The ring was in a wooden box. It was supposed to be worn on the gloved hand of the Pope. So I went to the library and got
The Book of Rings
by Kunitz. And there in the book was an exact diagram of this ring. The ring was humongous. I wanted to authenticate it and sell it to Bobby Kennedy, who was alive at the time, for a hundred grand, which was a low figure. Then let him donate it to the church and get all the credit. I just wanted the hundred grand.