Moloch: Or, This Gentile World (30 page)

WHENEVER THE PHENOMENON KNOWN TO ASTROLOGERS
as a “grand conjunction” took place this pockmarked planet became the scene of curious and extraordinary occurrences. The Great American Telegraph Company, for instance, usually responded to this portent by issuing a bonus to its employees.

Thus it happened that Dion Moloch found himself at Cooper Square one evening with several hundred dollars in his pocket. He might have bought himself an extra shirt or a new tie or, like most of the married men in the telegraph company, he might have rushed home to his wife with a bouquet of roses and, holding her hand to his, sat up half the night examining advertisements for suburban homes.

But he did none of these things. He kept the money intact in the right-hand pocket of his trousers. He had other plans. As he set his face towards the North River, whom did he see approaching but his very dear friend Randolph Scott.

“Well, you old bum!” shouted Randy, beaming affectionately.

They exchanged the usual greetings of old friends who have drifted apart and are somewhat ashamed of the fact.

“I wish you had been with me just a few hours ago,” said Randy. “Pfui! I saw something that made me turn cold inside.”

Moloch was curious. Randy could be upset by the most diverse phenomena. Sometimes he was overwhelmed by the sight of an old building being torn down; or, if it were late at night and a beggar accosted him, he went home blubbering. His latest revulsion was for dressed beef.

Randy stopped short in the middle of his narrative.

“Did you ever stop to examine a dressed pig?”

He made a shuddering grimace.

“Ugh! I saw one hanging in the window a little while ago. Man, you should have seen it!
All suet!
Christ! Do we turn into suet that way, too?”

Moloch let out a howl.

“So that’s what’s bothering you …
suet?
”
He roared some more.

Randy looked peeved. “I don’t see what’s so funny in that. You go and stand in front of a meat store someday. Look at a dead pig for fifteen minutes. God, this one was nothing but fat, and the anus was simply a great big hole that had been cut away with a knife.”

“And you’re disturbed about how you’re going to look when you’re dead, is that it? Believe me, Randy, you won’t look half so good, I can tell you that.”

Randy hesitated a few moments. He was grappling with an idea.

“No-o-o,” he drawled, “I don’t give a damn what they do to me when I’m dead. I’m just thinking of what we carry around with us all the time—lumps of fat and gristle, blue and purplish veins, gizzards, bile, kidneys, a string of intestines … and that ugly damned skeleton. Wow!” He smacked his face soundly. It was a medieval touch, often employed in conjunction with the reading of Jeremiah.

Moloch thwacked him bravely for good measure. Randy coughed in embarrassment—one of those feeble theater coughs which saturates the culprit with the effluence of his own pity.

“It’s not age that’s getting you,” said Moloch heartily, “it’s just a touch of neurasthenia, you poor old slob. A little more poetry in your soul, and with that nervous sensitivity you could grind out marvelous stuff. The Germans would lionize you.” He gave Randy a stiff poke in the ribs.

“‘Man and Woman Going Through the Cancer Ward’! How do you fancy that for a title?”

“Are you going daffy?” said Randy. However, he was growing decidedly more cheerful. To him cancer was almost as engrossing as insanity.

It was a splendid evening for morbid inquiries. Sepia-colored clouds rent the sky in tatters. The Sixth Avenue “L” structure shrieked with the weight of human freight; it was human freight, all right, because thick newspapers separated one piece of freight from the other.

Presently Randy raised his voice above the din of traffic and, fired with a druid’s passion, bellowed in his companion’s ear:

“At this very minute people are passing out by the thousands, begging the Almighty to forgive them. The earth is filled with groans and wailing. Children are being torn from their mothers in pangs of childbirth; ships are going down at sea while the multitude listens placidly to radio concerts, safe and snug at home. Destruction and misery everywhere—that’s all I can see.”

Moloch made an ear trumpet of his hands.

“And I see lovers and mistresses, husbands and other men’s wives climbing into bed, snuggling under the blankets … Honolulu, Copenhagen, Zanzibar, Stamboul, Nagasaki, Moscow, Dubuque, Hoboken. They’re all around us, Randy …
everywhere!
If we could only knock the walls down this minute, eh what?”

“You win,” Randy exclaimed. “I knew we’d come to that sooner or later.”

He put his arms about his friend and licked him with bloodshot eyes. The universe which a moment ago had been an abattoir floating in a crimson lake became a chop suey joint again. (For Randolph Scott!)

Randolph Scott once read, in the pages of a financial journal, that light travels fast until it encounters the human mind. At the mention of lovers climbing into bed through all the gridiron of latitude and longitude his mind traveled so fast that he thought the scientists had made an error when they computed the speed at which light travels per second. It was absolutely ridiculous, to be sure, but after he had violated queens, dowagers, scullion maids, and all the coryphées of the Folies Bergère in turn, his mind was as dry as the inner rind of a navel orange.

“Keep this under your hat,” he announced, “but I’ve been striking some good stuff lately. You ought to get a car, do you know that?”

“Yes?” said the other, thinking of Roxand, daughter of the king of Samarkand, swooning in the mist of centuries.

“Do you still keep a notebook?” Moloch ventured to inquire.

“A notebook? What do I need a notebook for?”

“Telephone numbers.”

“Telephone numbers? What… with the way these floozies are running around? Wait here a few minutes; I’ll get you as nifty a piece of. •. .”

“Hold on, Randy! Not now.”

“Why? What are you doing?”

“Come along with me. I’m giving a blowout … wine, spaghetti, cigarros … any damned thing you want.”

“What’s come over you all of a sudden … too much money?”

“Hell, no! I’m paying off a bunch of old debts.”

“Don’t be foolish! Pay half of them … stick the rest in the bank. Come on, I know where we can pick up …”

“Nothing doing. You’re coming with me. I’m throwing a banquet tonight. Here, it’s right down this street. Are you coming?” shouted Moloch.

Randy seemed on the point of accepting, grew suddenly hesitant, and then stood stock still.

“Any women in the party?”

“No.” .

“No women?”

“No, I told you.”

“So long, then!”

“So long!”

Neither turned to look back.

At eight-fifteen, punctual as a Twentieth Century Limited, Dion Moloch and his thirteen satisfied creditors were moving south and east in three Yellow taxis. Fourteen theater tickets, marked A2, A4, and so on, were stacked in his vest pocket like so many Sweet Caporal soubrettes which youngsters used to accumulate in the days when Admiral Dewey sailed into Manila Bay.

At St. Marks-on-the-Bouwerie the flotilla turns into the Judean Way. St. Marks, in its somnolescence, is turning a gentle tutti-frutti. Everywhere letters like music. Everywhere black snow, lousy wigs, unfurled beards.

Watch this window for slightly used bargainsl 

            Cut rates

                 Slashed prices 

                         Must vacate

Buy, buy, buy! Poverty walking about in fur coats; match vendors with fat jewels in the safe deposit vaults. Bankbooks hidden away in tattered trousers. Turkish Baths, Russian Baths, Sitz Baths, Public Baths. Baths, baths, baths—but no cleanliness.

Signs, placards, posters, electric light displays: the world made palatable, fashionable, lecherous, odoriferous. Dirty linen, adenoids, catarrh. An irruption of pimples, blackheads, warts, and wens.

A planet turned inside out, ransacked for trifles. A greasy vest, this Judean Way, over the fat belly of the metropolis.

Further along, movie houses, clinics, dance halls, tabernacles. The ghost of Jacob Gordin trudging through the blood-soaked tundras of Siberia. Natacha Rambova in a Laura Jean Libby anachronism....
Parisian
Love
with Clara Bow.

Still further along … “Bridgework, reasonable prices.” The Roumanian Rotisserie tickling the cold storage rump of Leo Tolstoy with the faint notes of a cymbalon. Renovated tenements converted into clean white facades glittering with pedagogical distinctions bulging with amorphous fur manufacturers and their bleating, dropsical consorts.

Messrs. Haunch, Paunch, and Jowl introducing Mme. Bertha Kalich in a morganatic marriage with the Second Avenue Chess Club. Frank Merrill in
The Speed King
…
The Golden Cocoon
…
Infatuation
… the Church of All Nations with Russian letters over the door.

In pillars of fire, threatening every evening at seven o’clock to turn the Manhattan Business School into a conflagration:

THE NATIONAL WINTER GARDEN

From a joke to a national institution! A laugh-exploding burlesque in nine explosions.
Burlesk
:
like it was in the good old days.

STOP!!!

Turn to Walter Pater’s
Renaissance
.
The chapter on Botticelli.

“Besides those great men there is a certain number of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own, by which they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere. …”

We will say no more about this conglomeration of bedlamites, this potpourri of pimps, pugs, and profanities, this melange of sybarites and cormorants. Not another word about acne, catarrh, eczema. Strike out the Kosher sign! These things are anathema to the polite American public. Besides, we are now in front of St. Augustine’s Church, trying to break into the long line of ticket buyers that stretches like the lower intestine from Second Avenue to the Bowery, and back again.

A big sign has been slapped under the illuminated cross: NO PARKING. But the wards of Houston Street have long ceased to believe in signs.

The lean Episcopal rector stands on the steps of St. Augustine’s Church and wonders if salvation
is
of the Jews. The church
is as popular as an alderman without money.

The line moves like a corkscrew pushing into the neck of a bottle. Plenty of time to read the billboards; plenty of time to study Princess Lolo’s anatomical modulations. Always a good show at the National Winter Garden. Always a liberal array of photographs. Three Oriental dancers with a string of beads. Soubrettes with a bun on. Hal Rathbun and his bevy of Rosebuds. Dion Moloch and his flotilla of cock-eyed creditors. Everybody’s happy. “Ask Dad, he knows!”

An election rig rolls by with a calliope going full-blast. Seated on the front seat, in a convict’s uniform, is a life-size dummy. The words of a popular song float out.

“
DURCH SCHIECHTE SCILAVERIM ZUM ELECTRIC CHAIR.
”

Anglo-Saxons would call it “The Wages of Sin.”

The line breaks to admit the passage of the buxom prima donna, swathed in 124 rabbit skins. She treads with mincing steps in coy red-heeled pumps.

“Let did lady pass!”

In the lobby two freight elevators with trick doors pump the crowds up to the auditorium. The doors slide open as smoothly as nutmegs scraping over grated glass. Bohunks, sick with anticipation, are dumped out pell-mell. Uniformed attendants are on hand to grab, grab, grab.. .. They are as shy as Tammany Hall politicians.

Moloch is mistaken for a judge, and is obliged to give the usher a tip. He assembles his henchmen with the air of Napoleon returning from Elba. Like the Corsican, devoid of ambition, moving on through the power of destiny. The audience is taken in like so much gathered snot.

A seething inferno of smoke-smothered red lights is the orchestra pit. Standees three rows deep behind what should be Z, for zebra. The Minsky Brothers are dreaming in the box office of adding an extension next season. They dream this every night for ten months of the year.