Where the Truth Lies (12 page)

The thing I learned—from a guy who once told me exactly how he’d murdered a married couple, so why would he lie to me about public transportation?—is that back when the trolley companies ruled the boroughs and northern New Jersey, their owners had a big problem. Weekdays, business was great; the trolleys would be packed as tight as Lucky Strikes. But on the weekends, the seats sat empty. So the trolley companies took it upon themselves to build all these fancy attractions as close to the end of the line as possible, so that people all along the route would have a reason on a Saturday or a Sunday to get aboard the same trolley or train they’d just said good-bye to on Friday. That’s how places like Coney Island came to be. And nice picnic grounds with swimming and boating. But most of all amusement parks.

My favorite amusement park was set on the high Palisades cliffs in Bergen County, New Jersey. Once they’d finished the George Washington Bridge, you didn’t need a ferry and a trolley to get there. You could take an IRT train to the old terminal at 168th, where you’d catch a public service bus across to Fort Lee and on to this place with beer gardens and bars and dancing and the most dangerous rides since Luna. It was called Palisades Park.

You had the saltwater pool with a machine that made artificial waves. You had a Bavarian Funhouse, where the most fun was standing outside of it, watching them shoot air up women’s dresses on a little outdoor balcony that the customers had to step out onto to continue through the maze inside. The view of the girls from the ground below was spectacular.

And speaking of “ground below,” to me the best thing about Palisades Park was that its big roller coaster was set right on the edge of the New Jersey cliffs. When you got to the top of the coaster, just before you took the first big plunge, if you looked down on your left, what you saw wasn’t the drop to the ground that the Hurricane was built on but the drop to the Hudson River some sixty stories below that. The town at the foot of the cliffs was Edgewater, and they said that was where suicides landed when they jumped from their apartments in Fort Lee. It’s not often in life you look straight down and see a different town than the one you’re in. Every time you took that first big crash down the Hurricane at Palisades Park, it felt like you were trying to kill yourself.

Most of New Jersey was strictly from Yokelsville, having been farm country until very recently, but Palisades Park, that was something else again. There were as many big, nicely attired, heartless, neckless Italian murderers operating out of neighboring Leonia and Coyotesville as in the five boroughs, and let’s face it: anywhere that killers hang out is automatically pretty hip. I mean, for starters you’re going to have really good Italian food, at least of the red gravy kind. And since every Italian is an honorary half Jew, you’re also going to have some pretty decent Cantonese joints as well. You automatically had good steakhouses, because a good steakhouse is determined mainly by a good steak, and a good steak is determined by what gets brought in from the Midwest on union trucks, and you know who controls the trucks and unions. And where trucks, unions, and gangsters go, liquor stores follow like Porta-Johns at a construction site, because there is money that needs to be dry-cleaned. The phrase “cash and carry” was invented for the mob, not the clientele.

There had been an unusual statute for a number of years that anyone could gamble in Bergen County except people who lived in Bergen County. To me, this seemed like the world’s most open invitation to take the money and run. But by the fifties, gambling was definitely outlawed. The Boys had a nickname for the criminalization of gambling in New Jersey. They called it “the Renaissance.”

At the center of all the prosperity was a big club adjoining the Park called the Casino del Mar. (The name was originally supposed to be “Casino del Mare” but they dropped thee to make it more American.) Almost a year before, we had played some of the last shows in the old nightclub attached to the casino itself, a four-hundred-seater (five hundred wheneverwe worked there, but that’s because some people will call anything a table) named Tito’s Cliffside Club, which had been plowed under to make way for a shiny new nightclub-restaurant-hotel complex. Not much was made of the shiny new illegal casino that was being built within the complex. Gambling was being moved from the front to the back room, which meant that the showroom had never been more accurately named, since it was all for show, and the front for everything.

It took the Boys a while to figure it out, but eventually they realized having a hot act in the showroom helped legitimize the entire operation. Why are all these cars coming across the bridge from the boroughs of New York City to go to this nightclub and hotel in New Jersey? If the showroom is featuring Penelope and her Trained Cockatoos, thereis no reason, is there? Of course, everybody and his sister’s cousin knew the reason was the gambling, but you can’t bethat obvious with it, or eventually the police or politicos will be shamed into doing something about it.

But if you get the hottest duo in show business to headline at the front room … well,sure, the crowds are flooding in to see Collins and Morris, and sometimes people get lost in crowds, and sometimes those people who get lost wander to the back of the lobby …

Near the doors markedGENTS andLADIES andMANAGER was another door markedCHILDREN ’S SWIMMING POOL. If you went through this door, you found yourself in a long corridor, mirrored on both sides, with very bright lighting. What you didn’t know was that the mirrors on the right-hand side were two-way, with several guards behind them looking you over and sniffing out whether or not you were kosher.

At the end of the corridor you’d go through another door, where you’d be greeted by a slim gentleman in a tuxedo, who welcomed you with a nice smile and ushered you through another doorway straight ahead of you. He’d even say a password, like you were being let into somewhere special, and he’d tell the guard behind the straight-ahead door to “take care of my personal friend, please,” as if you were a privileged character. On the other side of this new door was a short hall leading to metal steps that led down to a loading dock for truck deliveries. It was all cinder block with a poured cement floor and the smell of exhaust in the air.

If it had been determined that you were harmless and had wandered into the corridor accidentally or out of dumb curiosity, you’d be directed to go back around to the front of the building to reenter the Casino del Mar.

But if you were some kind of fink, the loud motor of a large truck would be started, its engine drowning all other noises. You’d be escorted by a couple of guys into the back of the truck, which had a long metal bench screwed into its side, upon which you would be told to sit between your escorts. The truck would drive to a private, fenced-in garbage dump called LATTANZI ANDSONS—LANDFILLoutside of East Rutherford. You wouldn’t get to meet Lattanzi, but on the way to his dump, you’d be beaten up, either a little bit or an awful lot, depending on what they thought you’d had in mind when you walked down that mirrored corridor on the way to their nonexistent casino.

If you weren’t going to be killed, the beating would serve as a warning, and you’d have to find your own way back home from East Rutherford, holding on to some part of your body that was now bent the wrong way.

If you were to die, they wouldn’t beat you up much at all. They weren’t trying to teach you a lesson you’d remember as long as you lived, because they didn’t intend for you to live much longer. Once your fate had been made clear and you knew the true meaning of the words “despair” and “loneliness,” they would put a bullet into you and bury you beneath a mountain of landfill. If the landfill didn’t crush you, it would smother you soon enough. Hopefully, you were already gone before the backhoe started heaping generous servings of dirt over your body. No one checked first to see if you were dead or not. If you weren’t dead yet, that was your dumb luck.

But if you had every right or reason to walk down that secret mirrored corridor, then when you got to the door at its end, the same tuxedoed gent would greet you with the same nice smile and direct you to an unmarked door on his far left, and you would enter one of the sweetest, plushest casinos ever located less than a half hour from Forty-second Street.

Most of the crowds that wandered into the casino were just fine by the Boys. These patrons followed the rules of etiquette that the Boys expected the clientele to observe: no cursing, no brawling, no cheating, and no winning.

As for Vince and myself, the situation was kind of like that of the bookies who used a bakery as a front, but regrettably the bakery made the best brownies in all of Brooklyn and people kept buying the brownies and pretty soon the horse-racing operation started to cut into the profits of the bakery. We were such a hot draw that the Boys would get a little angry with us. By the time the high rollers hired the limo for themselves and their mistresses, ate a big fancy dinner in the Blue Grotto with lobsterfra diavolo for ten and liquor for twenty, and greased every palm of every worker on up: the busboy, the water boy, the men’s room attendant with the bottles of Pinaud and Vitalis and Aqua Velva, the ladies’ powder-room attendant, the coat-check girl, the cigarette girl for a cigar or a fast blow job in the parking lot, the corsage girl, the camera girl who you’d pay for taking a picture (or pay even more for destroying the negative), the bartender who set you up with the cigarette girl, your waiter, your other waiter, your other waiter’s brother who made the Caesar salad at your table, the sommelier, the captain, the maître d’, the other maître d’ who flambéed your cherries at your table, the coat-check girl again, the doorman, the parking-lot attendant, the tip for the limo driver, not to mention (which I’m mentioning) the cover charge, the music charge, the setup charge, and the drink minimum for forty minutes of the songs and comedy antics of Vince Collins and Lanny Morris … who the hell had any money left to gamble?

And that was if you went with your wife or girlfriend. God forbid you and your friends went stag. Then there’d be the hookers. And the hotel rooms for you and the hookers. And tipping the night clerk and the elevator operator to look the other way, and room service, and the whole thing would start up again.

There might also be the cost of drugs.

You gotta understand about drugs in the late fifties, early sixties. There were drug “addicts.” These were blacks or jazz musicians (many of whom, you’ll note, were already black to begin with). And then there were people who sometimes did drugs. But since they were white and had jobs and homes and none of them were full-time working musicians, they were not drug “addicts.” They were just jet-setters. At least this was the thinking of the time. Pepsi used to have a jingle suggesting that their cola would keep you “young and fair and debonair.” Affluent people who used drugs were just beingextremely debonair.

To our limited way of thinking, anything you didn’t take with a needle was okay. It wasn’tserious serious. It was like running a red light. Everyone used bennies. Vince added them to his morning coffee like saccharine pills. We used to sing, to the tune of “Lollipop” by the Chordettes: “Benzedrine, methedrine, why not amphetamine …”

I realize this is a startling confession but we were … “up.” All the time. We had figured out that if you slept eight hours a day (which I hear a lot of people like to do), this was one-third of your life gone, shot, lost forever. If you lived to be seventy-two and always slept eight hours a day, you were giving up your active time on earth from age twenty-one to forty-five. Well, come on. Would you have wanted to go from your college graduation ceremony directly to being forty-five, leaving out all you did in between?

When we did finally decide to flatten out (choosing to get unconscious was much less of a defeat than falling asleep), we’d take two or three Tuinals (or one or twoThree -inals—joke, an old one, not mine). They were real good. Between the moment you took them and passing out, they felt really … sexy, you know?

The only drug problem Vince and I ever had was that sometimes we’d run a little low on drugs. Then we’d do our comedy bit with the audience: “Is there a doctor in the house?” We’d always find some smart young Jewish Dr. Stephen Something with his young wife in the audience. Backstage after the show, one of us would ask him, “Listen, as long as I’m giving you my autograph, you think you could give me yours for some medication I need? I’m out of town and they tell me I can’t use my doctor’s prescription out of state. It’s just for some of those pills, the green-and-black ones, what are they called? Yeah, that’s it. Just so I can sleep.” Or, sometimes, “keep the weight off.” The Dr. Steves were more than happy to oblige. They felt it made them our pal.

The Casino had built a brand-new showroom called the Blue Grotto, and it was a very nice place. Lots of good seafood with a Sicilian touch, meaning they shot the lobsters in the back of the head before broiling them (joke).

The showroom was actually belowground, leaving room for the hotel lobby and the hidden casino behind the long barricade of the front desk. The walls of the Blue Grotto were done to look like the walls of a cave, like a funhouse or a Tunnel of Love. They were made of Liquifoam, a mix of plaster and Styrofoam, flammable as all hell, but the Boys had learned that it was a lot cheaper to give a fire inspector two hundred bucks and a ringside table at our show than to spend thousands of dollars on fireproofing. Besides, it was always vital in a business enterprise of this sort to have available the option to torch the place at a moment’s notice, should the need present itself.

So this tinderbox called the Blue Grotto sat twelve hundred patrons in total comfort and danger. There were four small waterfalls with catch basins in the four corners of the room—nothing too fancy, you understand, but the nice thing was that blue spotlights hit the basins and reflected the shimmer of running water on the walls of the cave, so the whole Blue Grotto seemed alive with rippling aquamarine light. You also could hear the sound of the fountains gurgling wherever you sat in the restaurant, which drove everyone to visit the rest rooms on a regular basis. The restroom attendants, who worked strictly on tips, liked that feature a lot.