Paradise Alley (3 page)

Presiding over it all is our upstanding Republican mayor, fuming regularly and ineffectually over each iniquity like some Italian volcano. Just beneath him sit our unspeakable aldermen and councilmen, better known as The Forty Thieves. Would that it were so. In fact, there are eighty-two. (Only New York City would take it upon itself to support a legislature of bicameral crooks.)

And beneath
them
a whole vast, imponderable hive of crooked
street commissioners and demagogues, dead-horse contractors and confidence men, hoisters and divers, shoulder-hitters and fancy men, wardheelers and kirkbuzzers and harlots. And all of them with a profit motive, all of them with an angle and a game, and an eye on the main chance. So many with their hands out, so much corruption that even if you wanted to clean it all out you could never do it, you could never even get past the first, most inconsequential layers of dirt.

In short, it is a great town in which to be a newspaperman.

•
3
•

I am a connoisseur of hangovers.

To the uninitiated they may seem merely unpleasant, but to the more experienced there are both fine and subtle gradations. Wine is the worst, even a good wine. The sediment clogs the mind like grit in the gears, and roils the stomach. A brandy hangover, on the other hand, is like a bell smashed with a hammer, ringing, but clear and hard. Sweet liqueurs fill one with a sense of sticky self-disgust the next day, like wriggling on some gigantic curl of flypaper.

No, the best hangover is just the right combination of beer and whiskey. Beer to fortify the stomach and give it something to chew on. Whiskey to soften the mind to a cloudy, cosmic mush, sparked by flashes of completely unjustifiable optimism. Done properly a good hangover can carry one through the next day like a thick cotton cloud, leaving everything a little unclear but at a sublime distance. A bad hangover can make one wish to die or—same thing—swear off drinking altogether.

This is not a good hangover.

There was no avoiding it, though. When you wish to know what men are thinking in New York, you must go to a saloon. Over the week-end, all last Saturday and Sunday, I worked my way down through them, and in this town you can find every gradation. There are high bars and low bars, blind pigs and blind tigers and respectable
snugs. Free-and-easy halls and bohemian bars and groceries, elegant club rooms and hotel bars on the dollar side of Broadway, hose joints and clip joints and shock joints and dives.

I worked my way down to the very bottom layers of sediment and sentiment, determined to hear the Other City where it was murmuring. Disguised again as a drummer, a rube—even
one of them.
Until by Saturday night I had reached the very worst crimp bars along the waterfront—The Morgue and The Yellow Man; The Glass House and the Hole-in-the-Wall. Terrible places, with their paint thinner passed off as alcohol, and a side business in murdered and shanghaied sailors. Bars where you go only to prey or to be preyed upon, or if you are too weary anymore to tell the difference.

Near midnight on Saturday, I found myself outside Finn McCool's place, The Sailor's Rest, where a few years ago Slobbery Jim knifed Patsy the Barber over twelve cents they had stolen from a murdered German. It is no more than a sagging, ancient pile along South Street. The nasty, ironic name, carved on a wooden board that made an awful creaking and flapping sound above the entrance. The saloon itself like all such places, furnished with no more than a bar, a few tables, and some long benches pushed up against the walls. Shelves filled with dusty, opened bottles of brown and amber liquid. Crude prints depicting the usual gabble of Irish heroes in America: O'Connell and Mitchel, and poor old Corcoran, and Meagher of the Sword.

In the back hang the slitted red curtains of the Velvet Room, with its solitary bed and notorious trapdoor. Most of the crimp bars have something like it—a room where strangers too drunk to know any better are plied with a great, complimentary bowl of whiskey or rum and escorted through the thick red curtains to sleep it off. Only to awaken the next morning well on their way to China or Peru or Shanghai, not to be seen on the dockside again for years—if ever.

Something was up, I knew from the moment I walked in—something beyond the usual shenanigans. I had been here before on a Saturday, had even taken Maddy to such establishments. There was always a fiddler, and someone banging away like a pagan on a goatskin drum. The red bombazine curtains blowing in the window, the only light a couple of smoky-wicked whale-oil lamps. The men dancing wild reels and polkas across the sawdust floors, with young girls just over from Ireland, who showed their teeth when they grinned.

This night, though, there was no lunatic drummer, no dancing. There was, only, a palpable sense of menace. The saloon was packed, but the men sat nursing their porter and ale, speaking in low and bitter tones.

I stood at the bar, where I could pretend to drink while I looked them over. Many of them were the same men and boys I had seen at the draft, brooding at the edge of the mob. Fire laddies, especially from the Black Joke company, and butchers' assistants, and gang
b'hoys.
Daybreak Boys and Swamp Angels, Dead Rabbits and Plug Uglies and Roach Guards. All of them repeating the same muttered litany:

“Sold for three hundred dollars! When a nigger goes for a thousand—”

The very spine of our City, such men are—the ones who do all the low jobs and the hard ones, who keep the whole great machine running. Indispensable men, really, and doing it all for wages that will barely feed them.

How I loathed them!
I know I should love the poor, but I don't, they are dirty and loud. Dressed up in their ludicrous gang paraphernalia—stovepipe hats and soaped temple locks, gaudy kerchiefs and baggy Oxford pants tucked into the tops of their boots. Brass knuckles and giant Bowie knives falling out of their pockets. They jeer and heckle in our theatres, shout obscenities at each other on the street, break up any political meetings their masters don't like. Always bellicose but helpless, cynical but self-pitying.

I want to love the poor, but I don't, perhaps not even Maddy—

“Drink up!”

McCool's bouncer trudged over to force a whiskey on me. She is a famous harridan of the ward, a six-foot-tall Irishwoman with red hair down to her knees. They call her Gallus Mag for the bright yellow suspenders she uses to keep her skirt up, though she wears a belt as well—a revolver and a slung shot tucked conspicuously into the front of it.

“C'mon now, don't make me get rough with ya!”

The Mag has brass claws on her fingertips, and when she smiles you can see that her teeth have been filed down to long, white points, as sharp as a rat's. It is said that she will bite the ears off any customer who doesn't go quietly, and that she stores her trophies in a tall jar of formaldehyde that is prominently displayed on the bar. It is the
saloon's running joke. Greenhorns reaching into the jar for the usual pickled eggs jump in the air when they find themselves holding an ear. It never fails to get a good laugh.

I duly ordered up a drink, and Gallus Mag grinned and slung it across the bar to me. I took a sip, tried not to make too sour a face, and failed—the whiskey's flavor and body no worse than the finest acids. Gallus Mag, watching for my expression, burst into laughter, throwing her head and her long red hair back, and setting the whole bar laughing along with her. I grinned weakly, trying to hide how much I detested them all.

Usually Finn McCool himself was behind the bar. This night, though, he moved among his customers like a venomous bee, spreading his poison from one little cluster of men to another. Shoulders rounded, prematurely wizened head sunk nearly to his chest. Going about his duties as a Tammany ward captain, and assistant foreman of the Black Joke.

The Black Joke and the other fire companies are the breeding swamps of our wonderful new mass democracy. There are dozens of such companies, supposedly protecting our highly combustible City. In fact, they are little more than headquarters for our street gangs and political machines—you go tell the difference. They pull their machines recklessly through the streets, brawl with each other over the Croton hydrants while our homes and businesses burn.

Each company has dozens of members, necessary to tote the heavy wagons by hand through the narrow lanes of the City. All of them volunteers, nearly all of them Irish by now—rough, arrogant young men who love to paint gaudy scenes on their fire wagons, hold elaborate chowders and dances.

They are cultivated by aspiring Tammany Hall politicians such as McCool. Dispensing favors and gossip, perennially booming his brother, Peter, who is the captain of the company, for alderman. Usually, on a Saturday night, Finn's saloon would have been lousy with the leaders of the Democracy—but for some reason there was no sign of them now. In fact, they had vanished from every dive I visited, all week-end.

No Captain Rynders holding court in the back rooms, his omniscient gambler's eye flitting over everything. No Fernandy Wood, oozing his smug, perfumed way through the crowd. No sign of the
enormous Tweed, with his oddly open, innocent boy's face—the monstrous mirror image of Greeley's own. All of them conspicuous in their absence. Their disappearance as unsettling as the flight of birds, or the howling of dogs and cats before an earthquake—

“Ye see how it is,” I heard a low voice behind me. “Ye see how our Mag deals with them who like to overhear what they shouldn't.”

I took a small sip of the varnish the Irish giantess had served me before I turned around. There was McCool, perched by my elbow, a smirk creasing his face, nodding significantly at the jar of ears. Seeing through any disguise I might want to adopt.

“She must be a regular Circe,” I told him.

I had noticed long ago that the ears, bobbing there in the deep, red liquid behind the glass, looked suspiciously pointed and large and hairy, even for the sailors and bummers who liked to frequent The Sailor's Rest.

“Who?” McCool asked.

“Circe was a witch—with a habit of turning men into swine.”

“Ah, but the bitch was a liar, then. For it don't take a woman to turn a man into a pig.”

“No?”

“No. All you have to do is treat men like swine an' they will live up to the rule every time.”

“Is it swinish, then, to stand up on two legs and fight for our country?”

I was drunk enough to be that reckless with him, though I suspected I had nothing really to worry about. Finn could have already had me beaten to a pulp; thrown into the black and oily river outside, or shipped down to Port o' Spain, had he chosen to. No, there had to be some reason he
wanted
to speak to me, a reporter for Horace Greeley's
Tribune.
Something he wanted to find out—

“Strange how it becomes
our
country when there's fightin' to be done,” he said, with a smile that went as deep as his teeth. “Anyway, I gets confused these days. Is it the country we're still fightin' for? Or is it the niggers.”

“Do you not think slavery is evil, then?”

“There are many evil things in the world. But I don't remember Abe Lincoln come hallooin' about with half a million men when all of Connaught was starvin' to death in its cabins.”

“Do you mean to stop the draft?” I asked him straight out.

He gave a short shrug, and stared at me more intently than ever, as if he didn't quite understand the question.

“But it don't matter what I want to do.”

“Is that what you're telling those men?” I asked him, gesturing over at his clientele, the fire laddies sullenly nursing their drinks.

Finn only shrugged again. The grin gone, but a slight frown along his forehead now, as if he were trying to explain something to an exceptionally dull child.

“You go ahead an' see,” he said. “You go an' draft the men who put out the fires in this town. Honest workingmen, what never wanted a thing from this life but to raise their families an' love their wives.”

He was well into his campaign speech by now, I knew, but there was something in what he was saying that chilled me to the bone nonetheless.

“You go ahead an' ship good Irishmen south like so many niggers, while their wives an' families have to beg the relief agency for money to eat. You just start that drum rollin' again on Monday morning an' you see what happens.”

He nodded curtly, then went back to his rounds, moving away as abruptly as he had appeared. I decided it was time to take my own leave, making sure to leave a healthy tip for the female behemoth behind the bar.

Once outside I walked immediately over to the dockside—even leaning out over the water. There, deep below the shifting currents, I could see the remains of an ancient ship. There was little enough of it left—a couple of broken spars, a few planks of its bulwark visible along the shallow, silted bottom. The name, in gold-painted letters—“
JERSEY
”—just barely illuminated by the lanterns from the ships riding at anchor beside it and the lights from the dockside bars. One of the ancient British prison ships from the Revolution, left to slowly fall apart and sink into the harbor.