City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (2 page)

I know a story.

“I know a story,” said Trick the Dwarf, and the rest of them leaned in close: Nanook the Esquimau, and Ota Benga the Pygmy, and Yolanda the Wild Queen of the Amazon.

“What kind of story?”

Yolanda’s eyes bulged suspiciously, and it occurred to him again how she alone might actually be as advertised: tiny, leather-skinned woman with a mock feather headdress, betel nut juice dribbling out through the stumps of her teeth. A mulatto from Caracas, or a Negro Seminole woman from deep in the Okefenokee, at least.

“What kind of a story?”

He swiped at the last swathes of greasepaint around his neck and ears, and looked down the pier of the ruined park to the west before replying.
All gone now, even the brilliant white tower festooned with eagles, its beacon reaching twenty miles out to sea. Gone, gone.

It was evening, and the lights were just going up along Surf Avenue: a million electric bulbs spinning a soft, yellow gauze over the beach and parks. The night crowd was already arriving, pouring off the New York & Sea Beach line in white trousers and dresses, white jackets and skirts and straw hats—all quickly absorbed by the glowing lights.

The City of Fire was coming to life.

He could hear the muffled fart of a tuba from the German oompah band warming up in Feltman’s beer garden. Beyond the garden was the Ziz coaster, hissing and undulating through the trees with the peculiar sound that gave it its name. Beyond that was the high glass trellises of Steeplechase Park, with its ubiquitous idiot’s face and slogan, repeated over and over—
STEEPLECHASE—FUNNY PLACE—STEEPLECHASE—FUNNY PLACE
—. Beyond
that
the ocean, where a single, low-slung freighter was making for Seagate ahead of the night.

He could see even further. He could see into the past—where Piet Cronje’s little Boer cottage had stood, or the Rough Riders coaster, before some fool sailed it right off the rails, sixty feet into the air over Surf Avenue. Where a whole city bad stood, back beyond the ruined pier—

Soon, he knew, the soft yellow lights would be honed by the darkness into something sharper. They would become hard and clear: fierce little pearls of fire, obliterating everything else with their brightness.

None of them now on the pier would see it, not Yolanda or Ota Benga or Nanook the Esquimau. They would be working by then, in their booths and sideshows. They would not see the lights again until they were on their way home, in the early morning; would see them only as they shut down, already faded to a fraudulent, rosy hue by the sun rising over the ocean.

They liked to sit out on the ruined pier during the dinner hour, between the heavy action of the day and the night shows. They slumped on the rotted pilings, where once a hundred excursion boats a day had tied up, to smoke and eat, and spit and smoke and tell their stories: Ota Benga, spindly and humpbacked, no real pygmy but a tubercular piano player from Kansas City, exotic moniker lifted from an old carny sensation of the past—

In the City everything was passed down, even the names of the freaks and the gangsters—

—Nanook the Massive, Nanook the Implacable, slit-eyed hero of the north—who was in fact a woman from some extinguished Plains tribe, signed on after her old man had tried to force her into whoring at the Tin Elephant hotel along Brighton Beach.

And then there was Yolanda. Immense frog eyes still staring up at him, curved beak of a nose, skin the color and texture of a well-used saddle—

“It’s a love story,” Trick told her. “It’s a story about love, and jealousy, and betrayal. A story about a young man, the young woman who loved him, and a terrible villain—a story about death, and destruction, and fire. It is a story about thieves and cutthroats, and one man’s vision, and the poor man’s burden, and the rich man’s condescension.

“It is a story about Kid Twist, the gangster, and Gyp the Blood, who was a killer, and Big Tim the politician, and poor Beansy Rosenthal, who couldn’t keep his mouth shut. It is a story about Sadie the whore, and the brave Esther, and the mad Carlotta, and the last summer they all came together in the great park.

“It is a story about the Great Head Doctors from Vienna, and the rampages of beasts, and the wonders of the Modern Age. It is a story about a great city, and a little city, and a land of dreams. And always, above all, it is a story about fire.”

“Ah,” said Yolanda, satisfied now, leaning back and lighting up her pipe. “Ah. The usual.”

This is how you kill an elephant.

They tried the carrots first. Buckets of carrots. Whole bushelfuls of carrots, and each one loaded with enough strychnine to kill a man but only intended to make her stand still.

She ate them. She ladled them into her great, pointed maw by the dozen, and after an hour of carrots she was still standing—still looking as mad and dangerous as ever, and the big holiday crowd was growing restless.

Next they tried sending in the trainers—one-armed Captain Jack, and Herman Weedom, and even Mademoiselle Aurora, to smooth her huge, rough shoulders with their hands, and whisper into her enormous ears. She only stomped her feet and waved her trunk around their heads until they turned and ran for cover. After that they tried the police, wading in with their new blue coats and their nightsticks to clap the chains around her legs like they would slap cuffs on a pickpocket. She knocked them down like ninepins, slapped and tumbled them around the ring like vaudeville mayhem players.

Finally they sent in the pygmies—figuring, hell, that even if they weren’t in the same weight class, at least it was their game. No one was sure if they had ever seen an elephant before, but they were troupers: racing around the beast, hooting and gesticulating, yelling at it in their strange heathen tongues until she was so distracted the roustabouts could slip in and knot a chain around one of her great legs.

She broke it off like a thread, but there was another one. Then another, and another, until the thick black coils of iron held each of her legs in place. Another one weighing down that deadly trunk and even her tail, until she was as completely immobilized as her tin image, the hotel down the beach. They soaked her with fire hoses, and wrapped the cables around her hide—smooth black rubber lines, bright copper wires sticking out of the ends like a bagful of eels.

Then they stepped back to see the show.

She must have known it was coming: the crowd gone still with anticipation, the workmen stepping back as quickly and gingerly as cats. For all they denied it later—claiming she was just a dumb beast, that she never knew what hit her—we could see it in her look, in those great, unblinking eyes, yellow with hatred and bile. Knowing all the while. Knowing, and hating, and staring out at me as the moving picture cameras began to roll, and the Wizard’s hand went up, and I pranced out in front of the crowd.

Call me a dreamer.

I was drinking down at the Grand Duke’s Theatre that night. This was a habit of mine. It was a way I had of leaving myself behind. Whenever I found myself unable to live without beer laced with chloral hydrate, or whiskey sucked through a rubber hose; whenever I found myself unbearably lonesome for trimmers and knockout artists and dancing transvestites; for blind pigs, and block-and-fall joints; for the Hell Hole, and the Cripples’ Home, and the Inferno and the Flea Bag and the Dump—then I found my way up to the watery world of the Bowery. This was my substitute for the razor, and the rope. If they but knew it, all men, some time or other, cherish the same feelings toward the abyss with me.

I was looking for a boys’ bar that night. It was easy enough to find them in the City: there was at least one on Worth Street, another on Mulberry, another on Mott. I knew, from times when the urge came on me too strongly and repeatedly, and I had to change bars to keep from being found out.

I had seen what happened when others of my kind were caught trying to pass. They were not tolerant, these rough boys, for all their own misery and deprivation. I had seen them strip and beat others like me-seen them tarred, sometimes even mutilated, then driven into the street and exposed in all their shame, while the street boys danced gleefully around them. Sometimes I had even joined in, dancing around the howling, weeping victim. You can imagine how much that cost me, but I assure you it was necessary—if I were to stay a boy.

Besides, I had no sympathy to share with them. They must have wanted to be found out: some secret shame, some masochistic wish, as the German head doctors would say, screaming out despite everything,
I am a man in this body!

It was easy enough
not
to get caught. All it required was a close shave, some soot to cover the lines in an aged face. Loose canvas pants belted high above the waist. An oversized jacket to hide stunted arms and legs, a big cap for the oversized head. Voila!—a ready-made boy.

A newsboy, a match boy. A chimney sweep, perhaps, with a dirty face. All I had to do was grab a mop from the janitor’s closet, or a pile of dirty old
Daily Mirrors,
and I was the same as the rest of them: a make-believe innocent in a city of monstrous children.