Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

  XIII

  They bring me the early evening edition of the New York Journal American and it shows a photo of handsome blond Claude being led by cops into a Tombs entryway (the Tombs Jail down on Chambers Street) and he’s holding two slim volumes in his hands, God knows where he picked them up, I guess at his aunt’s house for something to read during the proceedings. The books are described by the Journal American as A Vision by William Butler Keats (that’s right, KEATS) and A Season in Hell by Jean-Arthur Rimbaud.

  Then, Io, on the bench in the ‘waiting’ room beside Johnnie, Cecily and all the other questionees, is Irwin Garden all eager with a buncha books and leaning forward from the edge of his bench ready to be interrogated. He wants to explain the ‘New Vision’ to the DA and to all the newspapers of New York. He’s only seventeen and only a minor, in fact completely useless witness, but he wants to be in on it all the way, not like Snitkin really but more like the old litterature in The Possessed. It’s his first big chance to get in the newspapers, he who, a year ago at sixteen had vowed on the Hoboken ferry: ‘I shall devote my life to the liberation of the working class,’ tho the only honest lick of work he ever done in his life was when he was a bus boy in a California cafeteria and shoved his mop cloth right in my kisser when I said something un-nicetized about his slavish position, calling him a Puerto Rican nonentity bus boy in a nowhere void. But bless Irwin, Claude, Johnnie, even Franz, the DA, O’Toole, the whole lot, it was all done and done as a fact.

  XIV

  It started to pour cats and dogs and Claude and I, together again now, with cops, go briefly in some alleyways and paddywagons, to a judge’s bench not far from Chambers Street and are ‘arraigned’ or whatever they call it but in the drenching roar of that rain, which dins throughout the courtroom like invasions and attacks from outside, Claude takes advantage to say to me out of the corner of his mouth: ‘Heterosexuality all the way down the line.’

  ‘I know, you jape.’ Because, after all, what else, and ‘you jape’ I only just added now, in those days I just said ‘I know.’ Then after another night in the 98th Street Precinct I’m brought before another judge, star chamber or something, with lots of people there, and as always the judge winks at me, every time I face a judge he winks at me, and the judge sings (and it’s still raining out):

  ‘Well as the old Swedish sailmaker said to the old Norwegian sailor, a sailor is safer in a storm at sea than he is on land. Hor hor hor.’ And he signed things, and banged gavels, but to my surprise it said in the paper next day that I was whistling a tune while all this was going on, which I dont doubt, because when I was young and I heard a tune in my head I just simply whistled it, and knowing the hit song of that summer I’m sure I must have been whistling ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love’. A big bunch of people rushed up to me after, a certain to-do was done with on the bench, I turned, I thought it was a mob of eager law students, so that to every question they asked me I gave a precise answer: my full name, birthplace, hometown, present address, etc., and only afterwards my kind plainclothesman sighed in the car as he drove me up to Bronx Jail saying:

  ‘My God, man, those were newspaper people, didnt you know that?’

  ‘I thought they were lawyers taking notes.’

  ‘You . . . now your father’s going to see your name in the paper, and your mother too.’

  ‘What’d the judge mean by land and sea, that was some joke?’

  ‘He’s a card, Judge Moonihan.’

  We drove up to the Bronx Opera House. ‘Now lissen Jack, this is the jail where all material witnesses to homicides are kept, you’re not under arrest, understand this, you’re simply what we call detained. You’re going to be paid three bucks a day while you stay here. The reason why we keep material witnesses to homicides in here, that is to say, people who know about certain killings, is so that when the trial comes up, he, you, the material witness, wont be hidin out in Detroit or someplace, or Montevideo, and, but, you’re going in here on the same floor with all the material witnesses of the killings of New York which includes Murder Incorporated boys so take it easy and dont let them scare you. Just keep your nose clean, read those boys in silence, study those books we picked up for you, that there cakes and ales is it? by Somerset Mann, and sleep most of the time, you can play handball on the roof, most of these guys are Italians, they come from the old syndicate and Brooklyn Murder Incorporated, they’re all serving over one hundred ninety-nine years and what they got to do is get a confession out of guys like you that can lop fifty years off their convictions. But since you’ve got nothing to confess, just take it easy. Tomorrow I’ll be over and see you for probably the last time: I gotta drive you to the Bellevue Morgue to identify the body of Franz Mueller, which they just found in the river.’

  XV

  I’m ushered in, evening, the Mafia boys are playing cards before each individual cell on the open cell block which is slammed shut at ten, they wanta know if I can play cards: ‘I cant, I dont know how,’ I say, ‘my father can.’

  They give me the once-over. ‘What’s this wit the fadder?’

  XVI

  The gates of each individual cell are slanged shut at ten and we all go to sleep, and O boy, a cold wave has suddenly hit New York from the northwest and I actually have to wrap in my flimsy blanket, even have to get up and put on all my clothes, reach down for a bite of my chocolate candy bars and see by the dim hall light that a mouse has already taken a few nibbles out of it. But I’ve got my little individual toilet bowl, little individual sink, and in the morning there’s breakfast, which tho it’s only dry old French toast at least there’s syrup to go on them, a little coffee, and okay. My wonderful Jewish plainclothesman comes and drives me down to Bellevue Morgue through all kinds of interesting clanging doors and we come there, are told to wait till the coroner’s done, have to go down and see District Attorney again and spend a dull afternoon smoking cigarettes on benches in the anteroom. (He tells me I can get out on bail bond, by the way.)

  But the DA comes out in late afternoon and does indeed say ‘Well, you’re all right kid. We’ve checked out everything and you’ll be okay. You’re not going to be an accessory after the fact. And if Claude cops out on a manslaughter plea there’ll be no trial and you’ll be free and paid for your time in the opera house. Now if you want to call your father . . .’

  I got the phone book and called Pa at his printing plant on 14th Street, where he was a linotypist working out of the New York City union, got him on the phone and said: ‘All I need is a hundred dollars bond, for this five-thousand-dollar bail, and can go home. Everything’s okay.’

  ‘Well everything’s not okay with me. No Duluoz ever got involved in a murder. I told you that little mischievous devil would get you in trouble. I’m not going to lend you no hundred dollars and you can go to hell and I’ve got work to do, good BYE.’ Bang, the phone.

  DA Grumet comes out again, says ‘How’s the girl Johnnie?’

  Every time I’m involved the police of New York seem to take more interest in my girlfriend.

  Me and the plainclothesman drive down to Bellevue Morgue in the gathering darkness and rain. We park, walk out, stop at the desk, papers are shuffled, and out comes a one-eyed Lesbian woman in a big bleak apron who says ‘Okay, ready for the elevator?’

  ELE-vator? DEPRECIA-tor I’d say, we go down with her, into a sinking smell of human refuse, you know what I mean, the smell of shit, pure shit, down, down, into the basement of Bellevue Morgue, her one eye glaring at me, as John Holmes would say, banefully. Gad I still hate that woman. She was like that character who charades you across the Styx into the Hell Regions of Greek Mythology. She looked the part and moreover was a woman, fat, sinister, the very wraparound for the Devil’s Counterpart in a Counterpane in Counter-Town’s Beelzabur Fair and worse: if she ever danced ring-around-the-rosy with a Maypole in some old Celtic or Austrian celebration, I’d as lief bet that
this here Maypole warn’t gonna last more than into May Two.

  Yessir, we were disposed and displeased into the bottom basements of Bellevue by her, and walked across a lot of file cabinets that you might think were handled by blue-eyed executive girls with Belgian builds, but no, it’s this big Irishman with a sleeveless undershirt, munching on a sidewalk or a sandwich or something, waltzes up from the rainy cellar doorway of the morgue where I see an ambulance opened at the back and some guys easing out a box with a body in it, and says: ‘What is it?’

  ‘We’ve got to identify one sixty-nine,’ says my cop.

  ‘Right this way,’ says he munching on his sandwich, comes to a Number 169, and whips it open like I whip open my files in which all the old records are kept in mothballs only in this case the old record is the actual body of poor Franz Mueller after he floated in the Hudson River some fifty hours, all bloated and blue but with his red beard still there and his familiar sports shirt along his side and his sandals too.

  I swear he looks like a bearded old patriarch, there lying on his back with beard jutted up, whose unimaginable spiritual torment had turned him physically blue.

  And his dong’s still preserved.

  XVII

  ‘That’s him, the red beard, the sandals, the shirt, the face aint there,’ I said and turned away but the attendant kept munching on his sandwich and as I say yelled at me grinning (with cheese sandwich stuck in his teeth): ‘Wassamatter boy, aint you ever seen a weenie before?’

  Today I dont think it would bother me as much. Today I could even be a coroner maybe. Looking at all those different file cabinets, if you ever go down into the Bellevue Morgue of New York, go ahead, write a poem about endless death in the big city train.

  I’m driven back to Bronx Jail and in I go and we’re all asleep as the rain drums on Yankee Stadium right outside the window.

  When they televise a game from Yankee Stadium and you’re looking from behind the home plate at the flags whipping over the right field stands, look further at that boxy structure there, white, it’s the Bronx Opera House where people sing. As a matter of fact we could even watch ballgames from up there tho we couldnt tell if it was Mickey Mantle or Ty Cobb at bat, with all those 199 years behind us, maybe it was mustachio’d Abernathy McCrombie Fitch Doubleday himself at bat with a gourd he shoulda floated away in down the Ma River.

  Tao Yuan-ming was a great Chinese poet a hundred times greater than Mao Tse-tung. Tao Yuan-ming said:

  The bitter-cold year comes to an end.

  In my cotton gown I look for the sun in the porch.

  The southern orchard is bare, without leaves.

  The rotting branches are heaped in the north garden.

  I empty my cup and drink to the dregs.

  And when I look in the kitchen, no smoke rises from the hearths!

  Books and poems lie scattered beside my chair,

  Yet the light is dying, and I shall have no time to read.

  My life here is not like the agony in Ch’en, where Confucius nearly starved to death,

  But sometimes I suffer from bitter reproaches.

  Then let me remember, to calm my distress,

  That the sages of old suffered from the same melancholy.

  – TAO YUAN-MING, A.D. 372–427

  XVIII

  In the morning the main switch opens all the gates of the individual cells and guys can wander out and walk around, go down to the end where the card game is, pass idly by, say, the Chinamen’s cell where the two Chinese brothers spend all the time with silk stockings in their hair ironing clothes for the family in Chinatown: both of them convicted murderers, but only one of them guilty, neither one will tell who did it, orders from the Father. (Girl, Coca-Cola bottle.) The card game is going on all the time. There’s even a Negro trusty who gives shaves and haircuts, I mean by ‘trusty’, I guess, that he’s allowed to handle a razor blade tho there are no precautions against suicide.

  But let me explain by cats: into my cell, as I’m lying there reading Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, waltzes Vincent the Falcon Malatesta arm in arm with Joey Angeli. I mean, arms over each other’s shoulders, smiling Italian smiles, dark eyes, scars, eyepatches, shot-out ribs, bathrobes, kicks and dont ask me the rest as tho I knew. They say, ‘Do you realize who we are?’

  I say ‘No.’

  They say ‘We were both hired assassins.’

  ‘Now look,’ says Falcon, ‘I was hired to shoot Joey Angeli here, my buddy, who at de time was The Mouthpiece’s bodyguard remember, World War Two, about 1942, so I come out and we pick him up and hold him in the back of the car, take him out to New Jersey, throw him out of the car and pump shells into him about fifteen, and we drive away. I get paid, the job is done. But Joey here, he aint dead. He crawls on his belly to the nearest farmhouse, gets a phone (at gunpoint he dont even have to ask), calls the hospital, boom, in six months they’ve healed him up and he’s almost as good as ever. Now he gets the order to hit ME, you see. So there I am innocently playing poker chips in a pile in Mott Street Italian section down near Chinatown near the Scungili Restaurant, and lo and behold, I look up and there’s Joey the Angel in the door. Boom, he shoots me in this eye.’ He points at the black patch over his eye. ‘So I’m taken to the hospital and turns out the bullet went in and came out the other way without damaging the inner vittles of my brain.’

  ‘I knew a guy the same thing happened in the Navy.’

  ‘That’s right, it happens sometimes, but we were paid to do these things, we got nothing personal against each other. We’re just professionals. So here we are now standing up to one ninety-nine and two ninety-nine and a million years and we’re the best friends you ever saw. We’re like soldiers, you get it?’

  ‘That’s amazing.’

  ‘And what’s even more amazing is to find a nice kid like you in a joint like this. What’s with this Claude kid we been reading about in the Daily News? Is he a pansy? Did he knock off his pansy friend?’

  ‘No, Claude aint no queer, he’s straight. The guy he knocked off was a pansy.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Well he never tried to make me.’

  ‘Who would try to make an ugly prick like you? Hor hor hor.’

  ‘Well also, he’s a regular kid, you know what I mean? Va va voom,’ I held up my hand, ‘a regular.’

  ‘So what’s with the Italian va va voom regular? You’re not Italian? What kinda name is your name there?’

  ‘Breton French . . . ancient Irish actually.’

  ‘Well how can you be French and Great Britain and ancient Irish at the same time?’

  ‘In Roma they call it Cornovi.’

  ‘What’s Cornovi?’

  ‘It’s English, British.’

  ‘So now he’s English, British, hear that Joey?’ And they start to wrestle playfully, pushing and mauling each other in my cell, then they get quiet and say ‘Well we see you like to be alone by yourself, says you cant play cards, wanta read books, we just wanted to know what you were like, kid. But remember, no matter what happens, you look at us two guys right now and remember that we were hired to kill each other, we tried, we missed, and here we are together for life arm in arm two buddies for life, like two soldiers, what do you think of that?’

  ‘That’s great.’

  ‘Great, he says,’ they say sighing, leaving.

  Then in comes Yogi the Hijacker. Yogi is Jewish, has big muscles, says ‘Look at them muscles. In my cell, you come by my cell around the corner this afternoon, I have manuals on yoga lessons, breathing exercises, diaphragm control, Vedanta, all that stuff. In New Jersey I used to hijack trucks. Then I got mixed up in the vendetta, you know. Meyer Lansky and Maranzara and Kid Reles and the rest. Everybody here’s mixed up with Murder Incorporated. They’re all a
bunch of bums. Kid, dont trust any of them. You can trust me, that’s one thing for sure. All I want to know from you is this: what that kid Claude the Maybreeze was, was he a shnook went for men’s pants?’

  ‘No, not in the least. What the hell you expect him to find there?’

  ‘Find something might interest him.’

  ‘Might interest somebody I can think of, but not him.’

  Then in the evening the Falcon with the black patch comes in alone and says ‘I came in here with Joey but was just kiddin around you know, like Tami Mauriello and I used to do roadwork with Mouthpiece when Tami was gettin in shape for a fight, I know everybody, and I wouldnt want Joey to hear what you got to say, but is that kid Claude a dilly dilly daisy? You know what I mean, a guy who waits around subway toilets for characters to come in? A guy who writes on walls? You know, like in the WPA art theater place? A queer? A homo?’

  ‘No I told you, Vincent, he’s just a regular kid who’s good-looking who got set upon by a homo. It’s been happening even to me all my life. You remember when you were young . . .’

  ‘Hey hey, I couldnt even play handball,’ he says, holding out his hands . . . ‘Soon’s I put on my bathingsuit all those creeps from Sheepshead Bay was watching. But dont trust anybody else in this joint, I’m Vincent Malatesta and I may be an assassin on pay but I’m honest, my father was an honest cabinetmaker, best in Alcamo and in Brooklyn too, come to me and tell me anything’s on your mind anytime. And dont be afraid of me because of my black patch and my reputation.’

  I wasnt.

  At least not in there.

  A few months later he was shipped out to an unknown hideout forever.

  XIX

  If it was Sicily, did they get him? Then Joey Angeli comes in alone and says ‘Dont trust Falcon, tho he’s a nice guy. The only guy in here you can trust is me, Joey Angeli. All I wanta know is, is that kid Claude a queer? Did he ever feel up your leg with his knee?’ he asked lasciviously.