Tiffany Street (28 page)

“Take it away from the old bastards,” he says, “and give it to the kids.”

He has given an awful lot of it to his son Kermit. I know. I drew the papers.

Young Kermit, in addition to the money, has all sorts of weird, not very well thought out but extremely intense ideas for proving to the world he is more than a rich man’s son. He is. Kermit Klinger is a rich man’s son who is also a Broadway press agent. I am told by other clients that Kermit is the best Broadway press agent in the business. Which is why he is constantly scheming to get out of the business. In 1969 he came to see me in my office. “Benny,” he said, “I got it made.” Kermit Klinger is thirty years my junior. But I like the way he calls me Benny. Nothing patronizing about it. Kermit calls me Benny the way he calls his shoeshine boy Tony. He’s paying for a service. Part of the service includes the right to enjoy the pleasure of being on a relaxed first-name basis with the servitor.

“What is it this time?” I said.

With Kermit Klinger there have been many times.

“No, this time I’ve got it,” Kermit said. “No kidding, Benny, I’ve got it. I’ve found a play. Brenda found it for me.

Brenda is Kermit’s wife. Her father invented the disposable diaper. Ours is the century in which the big fortunes are made not in heavy metals, but in simplifying matters at almost any human orifice.

“Everybody thinks Brenda is a dum-dum,” Kermit Klinger said of his wife. “Because she’s not always in there pitching with the bing-bing talk, and her father made it with the disposable diaper, and she went to Sarah Lawrence.”

“My wife went to Sarah Lawrence,” I said.

Kermit Klinger looked at me with annoyance. “Are you comparing your Elizabeth Ann to my Brenda?”

If I were, my Elizabeth Ann would have been justified in sending me to Coventry until the ground hog sees his own shadow.

“No,” I said. “Of course I’m not. I merely want to make the point that just because a girl went to Sarah Lawrence—”

“Listen, Benny,” Kermit said. “At the rates you log me in on your billing diary for these visits, don’t make points I can get for free from the kid who takes my shoes down to be shined in the barbershop in the lobby of my office building.”

“Are they vici kid?” I said.

“What?” Kermit Klinger said.

“Your shoes,” I said. “Are they made of vici kid?”

“What the hell is vici kid?” Kermit said.

“Let me have a look,” I said.

Kermit put his right foot up on my desk. Lovely. Ira Bern would have approved.

“It’s vici kid all right,” I said.

“So what?” Kermit said.

I took a dime from my pocket and tossed it across the desk. “Give that to the kid who takes your shoes down to be shined,” I said.

Kermit picked up the dime. He looked puzzled. Who could blame him? “What for?” he said.

“Tell the kid to buy himself a ruggle.”

Kermit laughed. “Benny,” he said. “How long since you had your last ruggle?”

My mind darted back to Maurice Saltzman & Company. “Nineteen thirty-one, I think.”

Kermit shook his head. “Boy, oh boy, oh boy,” he said.“You pay lawyers a fortune to give you advice, and they don’t even know about ruggles. Benny, boy, I have a ruggle and coffee for breakfast every morning at the Stage Deli before I go up to the office. At the Stage Deli, Benny, a ruggle today goes for sixty cents. You add the twenty-five cents for the cup of coffee you need to dunk it in, and you’ve shot the ass out of a buck before you even get to the tip.”

“Well,” I said, “in nineteen thirty-one—”

“Benny, I was not around in nineteen thirty-one,” Kermit Klinger said. “When I first encountered the ruggle, the Japs had just dropped the old Sixth Avenue El on us at Schofield Barracks, and I was getting my brains knocked out by Mr. Frohnknecht, my intermediate algebra teacher at James Monroe High School. So stop already with the price of ruggles and let’s get back to this wonderful play Brenda found for me in the public domain.”

“You mean it was copyrighted more than fifty-six years ago?” I said.

“No,” Kermit said. “It was written during the Depression, and they did it in one of those dumps on West Fourteenth Street. A mimeograph job. They never bothered to copyright the damn thing.”

“What’s so wonderful about it?” I said.

“It gives the period,” Kermit said. “I mean—boy, does it give the period! Get with it, Benny. Everybody these days is nuts about nostalgia. Picture books at twenty bucks a throw on how to make clabber down in Williamsburg at the time Cornwallis was surrendering to Washington at Yorktown. Old photograph albums with that cockamamy
Police Gazette
type face showing women in bustles eating turtle soup with Diamond Jim Brady at the old Waldorf on Thirty-fourth and Fifth. People breaking down the doors of the Imperial and the Majestic at ice prices to see revivals of these cruddy musicals from the days when chorus girls were as flat-chested as Buster Keaton, and DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson were writing those songs for diabetics called ‘When I Take My Sugar to Pee.’ You know, Benny. Everything was simpler in nineteen thirty-one. Simpler and better. Remember? There were breadlines, sure. But people helped each other. They shared what they had. And what they had was guess what? Bubkes. Natch. Al Capone was beating out the brains of rival gangsters with a baseball bat at public banquets, but he did it in a nice way. Norman Rockwell was painting those covers on
The Saturday Evening Post
that showed The Old Country Doctor putting his stethoscope to a little girl’s doll. There was no drug scene. The only thing high school kids shot was baskets in the gym. No campus riots. College kids were too busy swallowing goldfish and seeing how many freshmen could fit into a phone booth. No acid rock. It was ‘Sweet Adeline’ and ‘The Whiffenpoof Song’ all the way. Kids just hustled out of high school to compete for that job in the bank, and if they got it, and they kept their noses clean, they ended up Judge Brandeis or Howard Hughes. That crap.”

“It is not crap,” I said. “I mean it wasn’t. It was a time when—”

“I know,” Kermit said. “I’ve heard about it. It’s coming out of my ears.”

“Then why,” I said, “why do you want to produce a play written about it?”

“Because this play is not
about
it,” Kermit said. “This play
is
it. The damn thing jumps at you off the page. It’s not Norman Rockwell. It’s real. So real it hurts. This play wasn’t written. No pens, no typewriters, no pencils. This play was walloped out with a sledge hammer. It takes place in one of those cheap dumps they used to call meeting halls. On West Fourteenth. A strike meeting is about to take place. Taxi drivers. They’re sick and tired of starving and being lied to by the fleet owners. They’re meeting to vote on whether they should go out or not. The whole play, the beauty part of it, Benny, it all takes place before the strike meeting gets under way. The drivers, all these angry tough guys, in this stinking dump on Fourteenth Street, they’re waiting for their leader. He’s late because he’s in an important meeting with the fleet owners down at City Hall. Whatever news he comes back with, that’s what will decide the men should they strike or shouldn’t they. This strike leader, he’s sent these guys a message. Don’t do nothing till I show up. I’ll bring the dope with me. So the tension is built in. From the minute the curtain goes up, you’re sweating it out with these guys, waiting for what the hell kind of news their leader will bring.

“While they’re waiting we see a whole series of flashbacks. Maybe ten or twelve. I’m not sure. I only had time to read the goddamn script just once. But these flashbacks, they’re the guts of the play. Each one tells the story of one of the hackies pouring into the meeting hall, and what this strike would mean to him. They’re ball-breakers, Benny, every one of these stories. They disintegrate you. There’s like this young kid, he wants to be a doctor, and he’s hacking to save enough dough to go to medical school, but he’s also stuck on a broad, and the girl wants to get married, but if he goes out on strike that’s goodbye Charlie to both medical school and getting married. Then there’s, let’s see, yeah, there’s this guy, his wife is dying. It doesn’t exactly say in the script the big C, but you know it’s not halitosis either, and he’s got to earn the money to keep her in the hospital, and the strike would mean curtains to that. I tell you, Benny, it’s terrific stuff. It hits you where you live. I cried, Benny. Can you imagine? Me, Kermit Klinger. I burst into tears. Twice. No, wait. One, two, three. Yeah. Three times, Benny. I cried three times. The tension keeps building and building until you feel—”

“The title of this play,” I said. “Would it happen to be
Walda Wexler Wait for Willie Wishingrad: Urgent!
?”

Kermit Klinger looked at me with a frown of annoyance. I didn’t blame him. He had been going good. Building toward his punch line. And I had taken it away from him.

“How did you know that?” Kermit said coldly.

“I was there,” I said.

“Where?” Kermit said.

“The Preshinivetz Playhouse,” I said. “On West Fourteenth Street. I went to a preview.”

“Of
Walda Wexler Wait for Willie Wishingrad: Urgent!
?” Kermit said sharply.

“That’s right,” I said.

“When?”

“In nineteen thirty-one,” I said.

“You really remember it?” Kermit said.

Remember it? I was reliving it. I was no longer sitting in my Madison Avenue office, logging in on my work diary a lucrative visit from a client. I was young again. I was back in 1931. Sitting on a piece of dirty bench in the fourth row, left aisle, of the Preshinivetz Playhouse on West Fourteenth Street. And I was shaking with the impact of this extraordinary theatrical experience. And suddenly Lillian Waldbaum gave me a sharp poke in the ribs.

I gasped. We had come to the climax of the play. Everybody in the audience turned. Down the aisle, striding with majestic decision toward the stage, came the man all the people in the play had been waiting for: the leader of the strike.

“Hey!” Lillian Waldbaum said. “There’s one of our former clients!”

I squinted to bring the young man into better focus. He leaped to the stage. He turned to face the audience. He raised his hands above his head. The theater was suddenly hushed. He spoke in a low voice. So low that, like everybody, else, I found myself leaning forward to hear it.

“
Strike!
” Sebastian Roon said.

T
HE BACKSTAGE AREA IN THE
Preshinivetz Playhouse was not really a backstage area. Just a sort of undefined shallow smudge. Standing in it was the girl who had played the part of Walda Wexler. Standing next to her was Sebastian Roon.

“Benjamin!” he said.

He came across to me, and he did something no other Englishmen I have ever met would have done. Seb threw his arms around my shoulders and held me for a few minutes in a tight hug. He was, after all, a Jewish English man.

“By George,” he said, “it’s marvelous to see you.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. What had happened the year before, and how I thought I would feel if ever met him again, was now all mixed up with the way I suddenly did feel. All at once my throat seemed ill-equipped for conversation.

“You two know each other?” said the girl who had played Walda Wexler.

“Know each other?” said Lillian Waldbaum. “These two jokers used to get drunk together in Shane’s on Twenty-third Street.”

Seb released me. He gave Lillian a sharp, startled, frowning glance. Then his face cleared and he laughed.

“So we did.” He held out his hand. “You must know something about the workings of the Maurice Saltzman office, Miss—?”

“Waldbaum,” Lillian said.

“I regret to say that the only person I knew in the Maurice Saltzman office was Benjamin,” Seb said. “I have a feeling I missed something, Miss Waldbaum.”

Lillian gave him the sort of look that would have safely fastened Martin Luther’s thundering assaults on the Pope to the door of the Wittenberg cathedral. “It’s too late to rectify the omission,” she said. “I’m loyal.” Lillian jerked her thumb toward me. “I’m gunna dance with de guy what brung me.”

“What are you two talking about?” said the girl who had played the part of Walda Wexler.

Seb laughed again. “Let’s do our talking across some hot food,” he said. “I’m famished.”

He shoveled us gently out into West Fourteenth Street and then poked us left into the Village. It was an area about which I knew very little. Yet on that night when Sebastian Roon and I met again, it seemed to me that I was rediscovering a once familiar place. I did not realize the reason until much later. Totally unaware of what was happening to him, Benny Kramer was falling in love.

Perhaps that’s why Benny still remembers the feel of that walk. In those days the Village was already run down, but in a delicious way. Like Montparnasse. Or Soho. The houses were crumbly at the edges, but they looked soft and inviting. Like good sponge cake that has been cut with a dull knife. You wondered what went on inside those houses.

The Village of 1931 reminded me of the London in which Sherlock Holmes used to leap out of the fog into a hansom cab, bark an order at the desiccated old creep on the box and then, as he sank into the seat, rap out: “And an extra shilling, my good man, if you make Charing Cross before midnight!”

On that night in 1931 we made it to The Family Tricino comfortably under the line. The middle Tricino daughter, Carissima, admitted us at ten minutes to twelve. This was not an unusual hour for diners to show up. Especially diners like Benny Kramer who had not yet learned about dining. All Benny knew about was eating. The Tricinos managed to remain financially afloat by feeding illegally people who ate cheap. The Family Tricino was a speak-easy restaurant. No booze. Just spaghetti. But they served it without a restaurant license.

There was one part of the operation that The Family Tricino seemed to feel was essential to keep the cops off their backs. For a few minutes after customers were seated, one of the Tricino daughters would plump herself down at the table as though she were depositing a dollop of whipped cream on a piece of apple pie. She would utter a few words, always accompanied by giggles, scream with laughter at what she clearly felt was a handful of good jokes, then race out to the kitchen for a coal scuttle full of Mrs. Tricino’s pasta.