Against the Day (65 page)

Word had gotten around. Showbusiness
functionaries at all levels came down to observe Dally in performance,
including restless impresario R. Wilshire Vibe, ever on the cruise for new
talent, who had in fact been haunting Chinatown for weeks. Sometimes he showed
up in disguise, his idea of a common workman involving spats and bespoke
neckties from London, though presently he reverted to type, the not perhaps
adequately subdued shine off his aquamarine morninghat indeed causing Dally
herself to fluff a line or two, not that anybody noticed. Afterward he
introduced himself with an unaccustomed sheepishness while Chinese stagehands
stood around impatiently waiting to set up for the next show.

“I’m thinking of putting something
like this in my next project,
Shanghai Scampers,
and there might be a
part for you.”

“Uh, huh.” She looked around to see
who was handy if this customer proved to be the sort of pest it only took a
girl a minute and a half in New York to tumble to.

“It’s entirely legitimate,”
presenting her with his card. “Ask anybody in the business. Or just take a stroll
up Broadway, you’ll notice two or three of my little efforts playing to soldout
houses. Important question right now is, do you have a contract here?”

   
“I
signed something. But it was in Chinese.”

“Ah, when is it not. Indeed, the
Chinese tongue is innocent simplicity next to a standard runoftheshow contract
in English. Not to worry my dear, we’ll sort it out.”

“Yes
and here’s my associate Mr. Hop Fung, and I must dash, so nice talking to you.”
She almost held out her hand as she imagined an actress might but was startled
to hear this uptown smoothie slide into what sounded like real Chinese. Hop
Fung, who hardly ever changed expression from his allpurpose scowl, broke into
a smile so dazzling she wondered for a minute if it was him.

Shortly
after, production money began to appear mysteriously in hefty amounts, usually
delivered in the form of gold. The cast list was expanded and more fancy stage
effects added on. All of a sudden, there were highbinders popping in and out of
doorways and manholes faster than you could say chop suey, jabbering a mile a
minute in that impenetrable lingo of theirs. Sinister young tong soldiers
wearing chainmail under their Western suits appeared to run dodging and
blasting away with their .44s, the smoke soon bringing a picturesque
imprecision to the scene. Horses, having been instructed to, reared and
whinnied. A small band of police raced along Pell Street to the scene, while
others, understood to be in the pay of the other tong, came charging up Mott
waving their day clubs, both parties colliding at the corner, where, clubs in
motion, they fell to arguing as to who had jurisdiction over the outrage, which
of course was proceeding regardless.
Glans penis
shaped
helmets, dislodged, rolled in the gutters.

At
this point a curious thing happened. As if all the expensive makebelieve had
somehow slopped over into “real life,” the actual tong war in the neighborhood
now heated up in earnest, gunfire was heard at night, Mock Duck himself
appeared in the street down in his wellknown spinning squat, firing two
revolvers at a time in all directions as pushcart vegetables were destroyed and
pedestrians went diving for cover, warnings were issued about what parts of
Chinatown would be best avoided unless uptown tourists wished to suffer
inconvenience, and Dally’s whiteslave engagement looked more and more
precarious. Coworkers she had taken for the meanest and ugliest of highbinders
turned out to be sensitive artistes in fear of their safety. Hop Fung was seen
popping twentyfivecent opium pills by the fistful. Doyers Street was occupied
by little more than an eerie miasma of silence.

   
“Maybe
I should be looking for another job, Katie, what do you think?”

   
“How
about your old pal R. Wilshire Vibe?”

   
“Can’t
tell if he’s ‘the real thing.
’ ”

   
“Oh,
R.W.’s real as any of them,” Katie assured her, “but it’s a fast, not to

mention godless, crowd, and I know personally more than one
girl who’s come to a sorrowful pass, including our own treasured Modestine.”

   
“Her
vacation—”

“Oh, child. There are farms upstate
for such purposes, and sometimes these wealthy vermin find it cheaper than
hiring a plugugly to introduce her to the river. Moddie got off lucky.”

   
“Well
thanks for getting
me
into
this,
Katie.”

“I’m
not talking about the Chinese, who are gentlemen first and last, their
arrangements stay always within their race. But it was Moddie’s choice to leave
that genteel environment for the cruel jungles of the moneyed white.”

   
“Well,
guess I’ll put on my pith helmet anyway and head across town.”

   
“If you
hear about
two
jobs . . .”

Dally found R. Wilshire at his
offices on West Twentyeighth Street. From open windows all up and down the
street came the clangor of what sounded like a whole orchestra of saloon
pianos. “Horrible, ain’t it?” R. Wilshire greeted her cheerfully. “Night and
day, and not one of those blessed instruments in tune. They call this Tin Pan
Alley.”

   
“Figured
you more for the marblehalls type.”

   
“Got
to stay close to the sources of my inspiration.”

“He means steal whatever he can,”
beamed a portly, whitehaired gent in a plaid suit of acid magenta and saffron,
who was carrying what appeared to be a sack of soup bones.

“He’s out scouting unsigned dog
acts,” R.W. explained. “Con McVeety, say hello to Miss Rideout.”

   
“I’m
also looking for a card girl,” Con said.

   
“A
what?”

“I’m in vaudeville, see.” Behind
Con’s back, R.W. was making frantic thumbsdown signals. “Don’t mind him, it’s
simple envy. I need somebody presentable who doesn’t drink and can hold up the
printed signs that introduce the different acts. Right side up, if possible.”

   
“McVeety,”
R.W. muttered. “Will you tell her, or shall I?”

Turned
out that Con’s fatality, a subject of wonder throughout the business, was for
finding absolutely the worst acts in the city, acts that earned not only
ejection but permanent banishment from even the least promising of Bowery
Amateur Nights—at which Con in fact had long been in the practice of
lurking backstage, waiting for the fateful Hook deployment, often able to sign
artistes before that instrument ever made contact with their persons, booking
them forthwith into such dubious venues as public toilets, patches of sidewalk
in front of blind pigs, and, briefly, opium dens along Mott Street,

till somebody pointed out to him that opium smokers provide
their own entertainment.

“I take it the Chinatown situation
grows more dangerous as we speak,” said R.W. “But you’d have to be pretty
desperate to work for this lowlife.”

“These lightoperatical tycoons have
lost touch,” Con pretended to confide. “For the Bowery is still the true heart
of American show business.”

“I wish I had something for you,”
R.W. shrugged. “Soon as the revenue picture improves, perhaps—”

“He means soon as he can find a
bookie who’s left the cash box unattended,” Con chuckled. “I’ll pay sevenfifty
a week, cash in advance.”

“What a rookie cop gets for a bribe,”
Dally said. “I thought we were talking about Art here.”

The two other sets of eyebrows in the
room went up and down, and there might have been a moment of silent discussion.
In any case Con came back with “Ten?” and the deal was done.

At this stage
of his career, Con was just managing
to come up every week with the rent on a failed dime museum he had purchased
for a song, whose gaudy sign in front redesignated it McVeety’s Theater. The
former owners having been in some haste to absquatulate, random items of
inventory had been left behind, the usual twoheaded dogs in jars and pickled
brains of notable figures in history, many from long before pickling as we know
it was invented, the Baby from Mars, the scalp of General Custer, certified to
be authentic, despite having passed from the Little Big Horn through an odyssey
of secondary markets which included Mexico and the Lower East Side, a caged
Australian Wild Cockroach the size of a sewer rat which nobody was willing to
go near, and so forth. Con assembled these in a tasteful display he termed the
Olio of Oddities and put them out in the foyer of his Theater. “Get em in the
mood before the show starts, see.”

Some
kind of incentive, Dally soon realized with dismay, was sure needed. Her job as
card girl being made difficult by audiences impatient, not to mention
unfamiliar, with print, after a while Con allowed her to make brief speeches
describing, as hopefully as she could, what they were in for. The nightly
talent included Professor Bogoslaw Borowicz, who put on what he called “Floor
Shows,” which, due to his faulty grasp of the American idiom, turned out to be
literal
displays of floors
—more usually fragments of them,
detached and stolen from various locations around the city—Steeplechase
Park, Grand Central station, McGurk’s on the Bowery (“. . . you will notice

interesting textures of tobacco juice
and sawdust. . .”), strange tilings from

demolition jobs that raised advanced mathematical issues the
Prof was then moved to go on about at stupefying length—as well as
“trainers” of stuffed animals whose repertoire of “tricks” inclined to the
rudimentary, narcoleptics who had mastered the difficult but narrowly
appreciated knack of going to sleep while standing up, three minutes or less of
which had audiences, even heavily opiated themselves, fighting to get out the
exits, and crazy inventors with their inventions, levitating shoes, greenback
duplicators, perpetualmotion machines which even the most distracted of
audiences understood could never be demonstrated in any time frame short of
eternity, and, strangely often, hats—notably The Phenomenal Dr. Ictibus
and His SafeDeflector Hat. This ingenious piece of headgear was invented to
address the classic urban contingency of a heavy steel safe falling from a
broken purchase at a high window onto the head of some unlucky pedestrian.
“Bearing in mind that any concentrated mass is actually a local distortion of
space itself, there happens to be exactly one surface, defined by a metric
tensor or let us say equation, registered with the U.S. Patent Office, which,
incorporated into a suitable hat design, will take the impact load of any known
safe falling from any current altitude, transmitting to the wearer only the
most trivial of resultant vectors, a brief tap on the head if that, while
camming the safe itself harmlessly away toward the nearest curbside. Here’s my
assistant Odo, who will be happy to rig, hoist, and drop any safe you ladies
and gents may care to designate, smack
on top of my head,
isn’t that
right Odo?”

“Urmhhrrhhh!” replied Odo, with an
eagerness some might have taken as inappropriate, though offstage Dally found
him to be a polite and wellspoken young man, who was trying to save up enough
money to open his own dime museum, maybe a little farther uptown, and they fell
into the habit of going for coffee after the last performance of the night.

From time to time, amid the unshaven
faces and dicertopped heads, she caught sight of R. Wilshire Vibe, always in
the company of a different aspiring young actress, or, as R.W. preferred,
figurante.
“Just looking in,” he greeted Dally, “haven’t forgotten you, have you
caught
African Antics
yet?
Basically
a coon revue, couple of boys who’re going to be the next Williams and Walker.
Here, take a couple of comps.
Shanghai Scampers,
say it’s all but set,
the score’s written, job now is to get the pigeons all lined up on the window
ledge, so to speak.”

Meanwhile Con had decided to put on a
Bowery version of William Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
,
to be called
Dagoes with
Knives,
which Dally tried out for, landing, to her bewilderment, the part
of Calpurnia, whom Con had de

cided to call Mrs. Caesar, Dally’s competition for the part
having been a blindpig regular named OneTooth Elsie and Liu Bing, a tong
warrior’s girlfriend looking for a different line of work, whose acquaintance
with English, both Elizabethan and presentday, proved bothersomely remote.
After he’d turned her down, however, Con had a visit from her beau and a few of
his colleagues, all packing .44s and hatchets, which left Con with a sudden new
perspective on the casting. “It was only a couple of lines,” he apologized to
Dally. “You’re a much better choice, really, but this way I get to stay alive.
I figure we can pretend she’s talking Latin.”

   
“Aw.
I sort of liked that stuff about drizzling blood on the Capitol.”

“Welcome
to the business,” Katie shrugged when Dally came back scowling.
“
Courage,
Camille, it’s only the first
act.”