Entrapment and Other Writings

  “I don’t doubt it,” Animal repeated himself. I saw the seed of doubt begin forming in his eyes. He rose and went to the front and stood peering out as if expecting the police. I waited until he came by again.

  “Where’s the cops?” I inquired.

  “We’ve decided to let you go, Pops,” he let me know. “Get out.”

  I got up but didn’t go straight to the door. I went down the bar to where Miss Stupidity stood in front of the cash register.

  “You owe me six and a quarter,” I reminded her. “I gave you a ten-dollar bill.”

  “I don’t owe you nothin’, mister,” she told me promptly. “You owe me.”

  “Look, Dad,” Animal came up to give me full warning, “we’re trying to be good to you, and you keep bustin’ our balls.”

  “Take him in the back room, Emil,” Miss Stupidity urged him. This one really wanted action.

  “You better go now, mister.” The rather pretty black girl came up, looking worried.

  I still didn’t feel Animal was dangerous. But over his shoulder I could see the Puerto Rican blocking the door. He was.

  Animal followed me to the door. There he gave me final warning:

  “You’re getting off light, Pops. You come around here again, I’m going to get another old man to whip your ass.”

  I was safe in the broad daylight of Eighth Avenue.

  “Because you can’t do it yourself, can you?” I hollered loud enough to get the attention of passersby. “You motherless alley fink, Bellevue is too good for you! You ought to be caged!”

  I sauntered off, having just scored the first technical knockout of my life.

  It took me six weeks to get back to Eighth Avenue with two summonses, one for Animal and one for Miss Stupidity, for harassment and for short-changing respectively.

  A great iron gate had been lowered over the front of the doorway. A bystander assured me the joint had been closed for some days.

  Who was he? I hadn’t even learned Animal’s name.

  Sooner or later I’ll see him again. He may be wearing shades and have his head shaved, but I’ll know him. Then I’ll deliver, personally, the message I had planned to deliver in court.

  WE NEVER MADE IT TO THE WHITE SOX GAME

  Russia was our Soviet fatherland. It was the one country where artists were truly free: there the novelist wrote of reality as he saw it; there the painter painted the world as he saw the world; dancers there danced without having to account for this step or for that, to some bureaucrat. It was the one country in which prostitution no longer existed. Jews were only one of numerous grateful minorities who now had their own nation within the fatherland; in which their own culture was cherished and defended.

  “I have seen the future and it works,” said Lincoln Steffens. (Or was that Bernard Shaw?)

  (Or was it both?)

  We began our letters: “Dear Comrade.” We signed them: “Comradely yours.” “Mister” was a derisive word. When we expelled a member of the John Reed Club (our Marxist art club) we derided him as “Mister” and he shuffled out looking broken.

  Stalin was our leader.

  We would not be moved.

  Here and there among us, of course, there were those to whom the lure of big money, fancy clothes, parties aboard the yachts of multimillionaires proved too strong. They denounced Stalin, snatched their dirty money and ran.

  They were Trotskyist running dogs of the imperialist warmakers of Fascist capitalism. They were rotten.

  James T. Farrell denounced Stalin.

  Subsequently I reviewed a novel of his in which I employed more spittle than words. I really splattered that book.

  Farrell reviewed a book of mine favorably.

  What? Run out of spittle, Mister?

  I was not to be easily placated. I reviewed another Farrell book: a denunciation of the author as well as the book.

  He reviewed another book of mine favorably.

  I was ahead two to zero. Or was I?

  In the late 1950s I met Farrell on a TV talk show. He gave no indication of resentment. We spoke about the old time Black Sox.

  I told Farrell that every kid on my block had had to have a favorite player. Mine had been Swede Risberg and I had been subsequently named after him.

  Farrell had seen his first White Sox game in 1911. He told me how the lineups had then been announced on the field by a man with a megaphone.

  On a Sunday in August, 1920, I recalled to Farrell, when I’d been eleven I’d seen Eddie Cicotte strike Babe Ruth out three times. The crowd had spilled over from the bleachers into the outfield. I stood, in the final inning within touching distance of Shoeless Joe Jackson. Final score: White Sox 3, Yankees 0.

  A month later the lid blew off. On the stand, on a charge of conspiracy, Jackson attempted to explain how he had gotten into the gamblers’ big fix to throw the World Series of 1919 to the Cincinnati Reds. He had been forced, he said, by threats from Swede Risberg. “The Swede,” Jackson told reporters, “was a hard guy.”

  In a blank verse poem written sometime in the ’40s, I had used Jackson’s phrase for a title, I told Farrell.

  “I know,” Farrell told me. “I read it. I liked it.”

  At that moment my resentment toward Farrell began to fade. He had liked it!

  The news, of course, had long been in by then:

  Orwell had been right about Big Brother.

  There was no Soviet fatherland.

  Farrell had been right in his denunciation of Stalin.

  Last year I reviewed his fifty-first novel, The Death of Nora Ryan, for the LA Times.

  The Death of Nora Ryan is the story of a successful novelist in his forties, two years on the wagon, who is living in New York City when he gets news that his mother is dying in Chicago. Should he go to the funeral? No, he says. Then: perhaps. The phone rings but it is the wrong number. If he does go, should he go by plane or train? By the time he decides to go the reader could have flown there and back. Nobody ever made Farrell hurry.

  Farrell was urged, cajoled, persuaded, consoled, threatened, and reproached for his methodical repetitiousness. It was like telling Lefty Williams he ought to pitch right-handed. Farrell winds up with great deliberation and pitches a ball with nothing on it. He has no curve, no drop, no fast ball. It is always the same pitch. He pitched it for fifty-one seasons and it never varied. The great flaw of naturalistic writers is that they cannot leave anything out.

  Farrell’s people are gray because their lives are gray. Their dialogs are dull and repetitious because they are dull, repetitious people.

  There were a dozen writers of the ’30s who had more color, more speed, more humor, more zip than Farrell. What were their names? What were the names of the writers of the ’40s? The ’50s? The ’60s? And the ’70s who had more color, more speed, more zip?

  “The main thing,” Hemingway said, “is to last.”

  Farrell lacked the tension of Hemingway. He lacked the poetry of Fitzgerald and the profundity of Faulkner. He had no style at all. But he lasted.

  And his achievement was enduring: he took the naturalism of Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser, and Studs Lonigan made it new. For thousands upon thousands of young men, then in their late teens or early twenties, Studs Lonigan afforded an impact which, fifty years later, they still feel.

  Farrell did something else: he is one of the very few writers who changed readers’ lives. Dickens did this, and Hemingway. Faulkner and Fitzgerald have no such effect. Studs Lonigan affected multitudes.

  When I sent the review off to the LA Times I had hoped that, somehow, it would get to Farrell and that he might, conceivably, acknowledge it. In which event I would invite him out to Yankee Stadium the next time the White Sox came into town.

  The Times paid me for the review but didn’t use it: change of editorship. The Washington Post asked for it. They too paid for it but never used it: again a change of editorship.

  I was still trying to figure out some way of approaching Fa
rrell in order to see the White Sox with him when the bad news came.

  We won’t be going out to Yankee Stadium to see the White Sox.

  Sorry, Jim.

  NO MORE WHOREHOUSES

  There used to be a bright little whorehouse on the north side of West 45th Street called the Lucky Lady. You came off the street to a window through which you could see a young woman sitting at a desk. The buzzer sounded, the door unlocked; and you paid her fifteen dollars if it were your first visit. She then gave you a small red card with the letters LL upon it; which reduced your entrance fee, thereafter, to thirteen dollars.

  A dozen lightly clad girls sat about a mirrored parlor: six were white, two were black, two were olive, two were orientals. All were goodlooking. One of the olive girls and one of the orientals were true beauties.

  Yuri was a well-formed Japanese woman of twenty-four, who kept a deadpan expression in the parlor. Once in her room, however, she always gave me a bright and cheerful “Hello Ne’son.”

  That was fifty dollars well spent, right there.

  The mayor at that time was inaugurating a radio program which, he calculated, would bring prostitution to a dead stop in New York City. Ed Koch would be remembered, by future generations, as the man who had rid the city of loose women.

  “We’re going to call it ‘The John Hour,’ ” he announced, “because ‘John’ has become a slang phrase for a prostitute’s customer. We are going to announce the names of all men against whom convictions for patronage of prostitutes have been obtained. The threat of public scorn will act as a severe deterrent to patronage of loose women.”

  The mayor’s plea proved almost infallible. The only difficulty was that it brought hundreds of johns into Manhattan, from such remote areas as Queens and Bronxville, in the hope of hearing their names broadcast publicly.

  “Not only will the johns now fear to patronize the prostitute,” the mayor assured us, “but the present imbalance of the law, of punishing the woman but not the man, will be corrected. I’ve been in office for twenty months and what I am advocating has the overwhelming support of the ordinary folk who live in this city.”

  Of course “the ordinary folk” will always support any mayor. But that is not going to stop a single “ordinary folk” from getting a massage in Times Square. Who does Koch think patronizes the massage parlors? The Ayatollah?

  It has not occurred to the mayor that, to the vast majority of “ordinary folk,” sex plays a vital part in their lives. To the mayor, apparently, sex plays no part until it becomes political. He assumes that the average fellow, in search of sex, wears shades and a false beard and lurks in the shadows near the whorehouse door. When he sees there is no cop in sight he makes a run for the door, disguises his voice to the girl at the desk and keeps his coat collar turned up while waiting.

  That isn’t how it is. The man walks up to the window in the same way he would walk to the mutuel window at the race-track, gets his ticket and hopes for a winner. The mayor makes a false presumption of guilt which causes not only whores to suffer, but johns as well. Because it forces both to employ extraordinary means to have an act which is good only when it is kept simple.

  Yuri had phoned me that the mayor’s cops were busting people right and left, so that she had been forced to change her address from the Lucky Lady to that of the Happy Hostesses, at 113 West 42nd. A couple weeks after her call I went to 113 West 42nd and was informed that Yuri had returned to Japan.

  If that chicken-headed mayor would keep his chicken-face out of my sex life I’d have more respect for him.

  The four hostesses at the Happy Hostesses were the unhappiest group of whores I’d ever seen. None were goodlooking. But, as I had already spent ten dollars to get in, I picked one who was at least acceptable, and she led me into a room without a bed.

  “Take off your clothes,” she told me, and left.

  I looked around. The place was like an abandoned barn. Yuri had had a big, bright room, with a big bed, and big mirror. She had even had a couple pictures on her wall. It had been a kind of home away from home. I stuck my head out the door and said, “No bed.”

  “Take off your clothes,” I was told again.

  “No bed.”

  We could keep this up all night. As I went out I told them, “Running a whorehouse without beds, you people have to be crazy.”

  I didn’t know, then, that it wasn’t their idea, but the mayor’s. Having failed to stop prostitution by shaming men over the radio, he had gone off on another tack; one even more unreal.

  The lights of the Lucky Lady, I was pleased to see, were still burning on 45th. I paid a fifteen-dollar entrance fee, but the place had greatly changed.

  A stage had been set up, upon which a naked whore, upon her back, with legs outspread, twisted and turned to ear-piercing rock music. A dozen johns sat on benches, paying little attention to the girl onstage, and looking more like welfare applicants than johns. I sat next to a young fellow and asked him what was happening.

  “They’re busting these people like crazy,” he told me.

  “Where are the women?”

  “They’re in the back. You wait your turn.”

  A tall girl, fully dressed, walked by holding a basin of water in her hands.

  “What a lousy way to run a whorehouse,” I observed.

  “Keep your voice down,” the tall girl turned to tell me.

  That cut it with me. I’m sitting with a fifteen-dollar ticket in my hand and she tells me to keep my voice down. I told her to go fuck herself.

  “Don’t you use language like that to me,” she turned to warn me, “I’m a lady.”

  I repeated my suggestion. She walked to the bouncer and here he comes. Here we go again, I thought.

  “Please keep your voice down, Doc,” was his only threat.

  “I hope,” I told the young fellow, “they at least have beds.”

  “No more beds,” he assured me.

  “I don’t get it,” I had to tell him.

  “They bring out a little camp mattress, that’s it.”

  I stood up. I had already blown twenty-five bucks and now I was about to blow twenty-five more. “I’m going to cut my losses,” I told him, and gave my ticket to a girl who looked more like a titless chipmunk than a whore, who was standing at the exit door.

  Two days later my phone rang.

  “Hello Ne’son.”

  “I thought you were in Japan.”

  “I went. Now I come back.”

  If you have any idea that I’m going to divulge her present address you’re out of your mind.

  Moreover, her name is not “Yuri.”

  THERE WILL BE NO MORE CHRISTMASES

  This was all in that time of year when tinfoil bells—red, green, golden, and deep purple—hang by silver strands in all the banks, in all the finance firms, in all Local Loans.

  For it was Christmas in all Local Loans; it was Christmas in the banks and Christmas in the finance firms. It was Christmas in the supermarts and on the used-car lots. It was that season when Save-Your-Home-Loans erects an all-aluminum tree bearing a slowly revolving silver-dollar sign, while lesser firms can offer nothing more atop their trees than a single, unmoving star.

  “You ain’t like other cops,” Little Stash liked to congratulate Oliver Katz, swinging one arm across Oliver’s shoulders, “other cops are rotten but you’re just no good.” And he hugged Oliver so affectionately that Oliver had to clutch Big Stash to keep from being pulled into Little Stash’s lap.

  Big Stash pulled Oliver back. “You’re my kind of cop,” he assured Oliver, “you dirt-eating toad, the personality is coming out of your ears. You could be Chiefest Detective. Then we’d all get rich.”

  Sitting beside Little Stash, Oliver looked small. He was five foot eight and weighed only 140 pounds. Little Stash was an inch over six feet and weighed 198. He was called Little Stash because he was little compared to Big Stash, who was six five and weighed 240.

  “I don’t want to be C
hief of Detectives,” Oliver complained, “I don’t want to be rich.”

  “I didn’t say ‘Chief of Detectives,’ ” Big Stash corrected Oliver by holding him even tighter, “I said ‘Chiefest Detective’—because that’s where the big money is. Only you’re too nice. You’re the nicest. I never knew nobody so nice. You’re so nice I’m going to pay out of my own pocket to get both your legs broke, you gutless alley-fink.”

  “He’s so nice we didn’t have to give him a Christmas present last year,” Little Stash remembered, “he blows his paycheck on us the whole year round and we didn’t even send him a post card to say ‘Thanks for your patronage.’ ”

  Big Stash and Little Stash ran the biggest bookie on Milwaukee Avenue between Grand Avenue and West Division. When Oliver couldn’t get to it to make a bet, he phoned his bet in. His credit was so good that, when he had an occasional winner, one of the Stashes would pay him off even though the bet had been made on credit.

  “He’s so nice we aren’t going to give him anything this year neither,” Big Stash decided, “another cop we’d hand him a small daily double payoff, but this cop we give nothing. This cop is so nice he ought to be packaged,” he added, sneaking one arm through Oliver’s. “Chicago don’t deserve a cop like this.”

  “Chicago ought to throw rocks at me,” Oliver grieved—“almost four years on the force ’n’ I never made a pinch—what kind of cop you call that?”

  Little Stash leaped up: “Oliver! You want to make a pinch? You want to bust somebody? Pinch me! Bust me! I’d be proud to be pinched by a stinking thing like you. You motherless carp, I think you eat mush with a double-pronged spoon! Pinch me, Oliver! Bust me!”

  That made Big Stash mad. He rose heavily and shoved Little Stash across the room with one hand. “Get the Top Man!” he challenged Oliver, crossing his wrists under Oliver’s nose. “Slip the cuffs on! Bust the Big Man! Put me in the deadhouse, Oliver! I’ll brag about you all over town! You scabby dead-picking amateur you, I give myself up to Chicago’s finest! Bust me, Oliver! Get your picture in the paper! Get mine too! ‘Horse-playing cop turns on bookie,’ the papers’ll say.”