Tesla (19 page)

According to the fashion of the time, our long-suffering hero tried to “improve himself by reading” on Sundays. He went to the library, checked out
Scientific American
, and took it with him to his stinking tenement. Reading one of the issues, he was informed by the sociologist W. G. Sumner that “it was a matter of very little importance if there was a huge discrepancy between the rich and the poor in society.”

“Thanks, Sumner,” Tesla whispered in his stuffy room as he turned the oil lamp off. “God bless your merciful soul.”

CHAPTER 38

To Bite Off an Ear

A few thugs held the wall up in the churchyard between Mott Street and Park Row.

“Who are they?” Tesla asked, frowning.

“Don’t look,” Stevan Prostran whispered.

“Why?” Tesla said when they were out of earshot.

“They’re the Whyos,” Prostran explained with bitterness. “The most dangerous gang in town. Don’t talk to them—it’s better that they don’t know you.”

Returning home, Tesla was always slightly anxious. He asked around and was told that he should avoid the Whyos. These Irish giants reminded him of the Lika giants. At the Morgue, they drank punch mixed with whiskey, hot rum, camphor, gasoline, and cocaine. They were armed with handguns, brickbats, and copper hooks for gouging eyes. Robbery was their trade, but they also sold women like cattle. They skimmed money from gambling dens and brothels, and they bribed the police. The lawyers Howe and Hummel, with a whole stock of false witnesses on their payroll, represented them.

“Why do they call themselves Whyos?” Tesla asked.

“That’s how they call to each other at night—like tomcats.”

“Where do they live?” Tesla would not let it go.

“Their headquarters are right here,” his young friend answered, squinting as if he was looking at the sun. “Otherwise, they hang out at the Morgue on Bowery and drink. There they have their price list for beatings and murders posted.”

“How much do they charge to bite off an ear?” Tesla joked.

“Fifteen bucks,” Prostran’s answered in earnest.

The morning was the worst part of the day. That was when his whole being started to hiss like a snake. Tesla planted his boot on it, but the sinewy serpent kept wriggling under his foot.

“Be quiet!” The desperate man tried to outhiss the voice of his own panic. “Be quiet!”

It was getting light, but the city was still hidden behind the gray drizzle. Autumn issued its order: die! Wandering aimlessly through the city, Tesla came across a group of ditch diggers. He squatted by the edge of the trench and asked them if there was any work for him. The toothless diggers grinned. Without a word, the well-dressed young man jumped into the ditch and grabbed a pick.

“C’mon, get on it!” the others jeered at him.

His whole body ached that evening. All of it.

That first Tuesday was the worst. The last blister broke on Wednesday. Its slimy liquid dried on his palm.

Dirt covered his sores.

“I’ve always assumed there was something guiding my life,” Tesla said to himself. “Now I doubt it. Maybe there’s no invisible ball of yarn rolling ahead of me to show the way. Maybe there’s only nonsense and emptiness. Inertia helps me dig, but shoveling dulls my mind. I work for the City of New York, digging ditches into which Edison’s cables will be laid. So I’m still working for Edison.”

He talked to himself like the crazies in the streets do. And he lived against his own heart.

In Prague, and even more so in Paris, he developed a taste for opera and went whenever he could. Horrified by his own envy, Tesla lingered around the New York Metropolitan Opera. The posters announced that Wagner’s
Siegfried
was to be staged. In the photograph, the tenor Max Alvary, dressed in a short robe, raised his eyes meaningfully toward the ceiling. Hunched, Tesla admired the straight postures of male and female backs. The angelic smell of cleanliness tickled his nose. The refreshing drone of the audience in the lobby sounded otherworldly. Middle-aged women flounced in their youthful dresses. The explosion of their laughter resembled the breaking of plates. The chandelier was full of embers. Smiling men in coattails talked to innocent women in low-cut dresses in the anteroom. The twenty-eight-year-old laborer observed all of it from the perspective of a temporary dog. Despair flooded his soul, spreading slowly like oil over the table. The pinging from the dwarf’s smithy in the opening scene of
Siegfried
resounded in his head. Threadbare elbows, bad shoes, filthy shirt, the odor from dirty hair and sweaty armpits—that was who he was now. His clothes were like a floor mat. People in front of the theater looked at him as if he was a hair in their soup. He almost shuddered when he heard the rotund doorman shout, “Hey, you! What are you doing here?”

The worst autumn in his life was followed by the worst winter. The wind turned snow into fog. The blizzards were so bad that newspapers called them “whiteouts.”

Tesla could see his breath as soon as he woke up. His clothes felt cold, as if they were wet. Blessed Stevan returned from his night shift with a joke on his tongue and warm bread in his hands. Stevan’s serene face dispelled Tesla’s gloom as he finished his coffee and went out to let his friend have the bed.

“All my life I’ve been working to serve mankind,” the morose inventor complained to himself. “Is mankind the waiters who sell buckets of leftover beer? Or the wretches to whom they sell it? The Whyos drinking alcohol mixed with liquid camphor? The prostitutes whose shelf life is two years?”

He was able to piece together some sort of meaning for his life, but it dissolved in the first icy rain. Steam rose up from horses’ backs in the streets. Rails disappeared in the sleet, and buildings vanished in the fog.

He soothed himself thinking of Mother’s deep eyes.

CHAPTER 39

“The Dangerous Classes”

Late March in New York could hardly be called spring. The foreman, Obadiah Brown, kept his word and rehired all of his autumn workers. Brown was from the southern part of the proud state of Mississippi, where they cut their hair according to the phases of the moon and then burned it together with their nail clippings. His bushy mane hid his big ears. A cigar pulsated in the corner of his mouth. A rare good word came out of that uncouth man. “I don’t like Slavs.” He waved his arms around. “I don’t like the Irish either. Or Jews. Or Italians, for that matter. But I can’t be that way when I’m looking you in the eye, brother.”

The first week after the winter thaw, Brown and his men were working on the route of the elevated train for the Bronx at Third Avenue. Carmine Roca was digging next to Tesla. The sounds of the body delighted him. He informed his cosufferers in the trench, “This morning I took such a huge shit that I remained amazed for the rest of the day.”

He had a habit of unexpectedly rolling his head and then belching like a lion. When he passed gas, he announced, “I just ripped my pants!”

Someone should kill him!
Tesla thought.

In the morning, Carmine snorted and declared in the trench: “Fabriccarisi la furca cu li so stissi manu.” (He is digging his own grave.) After the lunch break, he raised his finger and said, “Zoccu si cumincia, si finisci.” (Finish what you’ve started.)

When they asked him where his family was from, he responded irritably, “Adrano.”

Roca knew everything, although he could barely speak English. He was here temporarily, and then… his own oyster boat in New Orleans, and then…

His nephew Giovanni Romanello worked alongside him. He could only smile at his uncle’s antics as if he wanted to say, “What can you do?” The sight of the uncle tired Tesla out—the sight of the nephew relaxed him. That Italo-Byzantine native of the largest island in the Mediterranean intrigued him. The songs Giovanetto hummed betrayed two thousand and five hundred years of melancholy. Tesla wondered: What gave that Sicilian peasant such natural elegance? Was he an offspring of the Syracuse tyrant Dionysius who sold Plato into slavery?

Nikola and Giovanni obviously resembled each other—the same little smile hovered at the corner of their mouths. Using his melodious l’s and r’s, Giovanni loved to talk to Tesla. He pointed out that the donkey was a good animal, even beautiful, so he could not understand why people made fun of it. The donkey was a much better creature than the Marquise di San Giuliano, for whom his family members were working themselves to death. He mentioned the bloody oranges and sweet lemons of Sicily. He told Tesla how half of his native village lived in the tenement on Mott Street, and how its bustle and smells made Mott Street look like the marketplace in Catania. The only thing missing was the marble fountain.

“One of my relatives has offered me a waiter’s position at the Venice,” Giovanotto smiled. “The ceilings are high, cupolas and a gondola are painted on a blue wall. Wages aren’t bad and the work is much easier. Hah,
vediamo!
”

Twenty-two-year-old Paddy Maloney dug alongside Tesla and Giovanni. He could spit and whistle at the same time.

Leaning against his pick, he told Tesla the story of his life. In the year of the potato famine in Ireland and the revolution in Europe, his grandfather came to America. He was from the town of Beltra, in the county of Mayo, the old province of Connaught, where the starving were green around the mouth from eating grass.

“I saw my grandfather sober only once and couldn’t recognize him,” Paddy told them.

He lost both his grandfather and his mother within a year.

“The dead,” the young man blushed and looked up to the sky.

“They had their own time on earth and we have ours,” Tesla said, trying to console him.

“Cigarette ashes were falling on me when I was a baby,” Paddy concluded deadpan. “They found me in the arms of my drunken aunt. Cigarette ashes kept falling on me…”

His neighbors took care of him for several years. After that, a Catholic hospital for foundlings took him in and sent him on the Orphan Train to a farm in Iowa to get adopted.

“Why don’t
you
get adopted!” With an obscene gesture, Paddy took his leave from the nuns. He jumped off the train and returned to New York on foot. He was a shoeshine boy. He was a newspaper boy. He hung around other shoeshine and newspaper boys. “All of these famed friendships are bullshit,” he told Tesla later.

The boy floated like seaweed, moved by the ebbs and flows of Manhattan. Tesla learned about the seamy side of the city mostly from him. As a child, Paddy frequented whorehouses where small newspaper boys visited nine-year-old girls. He grew up in a maelstrom of popular impressions. He adored Stevie Brodie who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. He celebrated the rat terrier Jack Underhill, who killed one hundred rats in a half hour at a beer den on First Avenue and Tenth. To him, John L. Sullivan the boxer was God. Paddy remembered Sullivan’s first fight in New York, when he crushed Steve Taylor in two and a half minutes. “Then he defeated Paddy Ryan, the Irishman from Ireland, in just eleven minutes.” Paddy’s memory was infallible.

He was on speaking terms with such important personages as Googie Corcoran and Baboon Connelly from the Whyos gang.

“He’s just a show-off,” the foreman grunted. “Otherwise he’s a good kid—a working man.”

Paddy recited the legends of the boulevard in the same way one would retell
The Odyssey.
He followed the developing saga of Tender Maggie and Lizzie the Dove, who wanted to slit each other’s throats because they were both in love with the elegant pimp Danny Driscoll. Lizzie’s last words were, “I’ll gouge your eyes in hell!”

Paddy listened to anarchists’ speeches at Tompkins Square. He was convinced that the Haymarket bombing in Chicago the previous year was organized by the Knights of Labor. He insisted the Chinese would steal white women and keep them as slaves and was glad Congress banned them from entering America.

“About time!”

Once after work, desperate Tesla let Paddy drag him to a bar that looked like a dilapidated theater, where a fierce cornet player competed with a tipsy pianist. The audience loudly applauded the singer’s blue stockings. Her mouth was so big she could sing two songs at once. Paddy tried to lure Tesla into the back room, where naked girls danced the cancan. A slight ironic smile was ineffective, so Tesla had to protest: “Please don’t! I really can’t.”