Piecework

The Lost City is full of forgotten common and proper nouns: Red Devil paint, Cat’s Paw soles and heels, Griffin All-Black polish might still exist, but I don’t see them anymore. Nor do I see beers called Trommer’s White Label, Ruppert’s, and Rheingold, candies called Sky Bars, Houten’s, and B-B Bats. And for young men going out on dates, a repulsively flavored package of licorice microchips called Sen-Sen that is guaranteed to keep your breath sweet while kissing. In some lost year, Junior Persico is in Rosie’s Royal Tailors next to the 72nd Precinct in Brooklyn, being measured for pants with a three-inch rise, pistol pockets, saddle stitching, a balloon knee, and a thirteen peg. He will walk home looking like an Arabian prince.

Meanwhile, the eternal New York war against the cockroach is being waged with J-O Paste and Flit. The men are smoking Fatimas and Wings. In the candy stores, they are selling “loosies” (2 cents a cigarette, two for 3), mel-o-rolls, Nibs, hard car’mels, Bonomo Turkish taffy, long pretzels, Mission Bell grape and Frank’s orange soda, twists, egg creams, lime rickeys, and a nice 2-cents plain. Everybody knows what a skate key is and what it means when your wheels get “skellies.” A pound of butter is carved from wooden tubs. Here, your only jewelry is a Captain Midnight code-o-graph or a Tom Mix whistling ring. And here you always have spaldeens. An endless supply. Pink and fresh and beautiful. Spaldeens: made no longer by the A. G. Spalding Company; street kids now would rather smoke crack than hit a ball three sewers. But we still have them here in the Lost City. Spaldeens: traveling high into the sky of a thousand neighborhoods in the game called stickball. The game is almost never played anymore, except by aging men. In the Lost City of New York, we will play it forever.

In this New York, you can still wander through the stalls of the Washington Market. You can get your hair cut for a quarter at the barber schools on Third Avenue and the Bowery. You can watch the leather-workers ply their trade at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge or watch the old craftsmen roll cigars on Astor Place or see an old Italian shoemaker working in a window with his mouth full of nails. You can bring your kitchen knives down to the truck to be sharpened. You can watch the iceman make his deliveries, stronger than any other man on earth. You can wait for the “rides” to come around in the evening: the Whip and the Loop-the-Loop. You can hang out at the pigeon coop on the roof. You can put your groceries “on the bill.” If you get sick, the doctor will come by in an hour. You can sit at the Battery and watch the ocean liners cleave through the harbor, powerful and regal among their court of tugboats, heading for berths on the North River (the reporters have arrived on the launch, with their press cards in their hats, and they are interviewing the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, or propping a movie star on top of a steamer trunk). You can walk out on the white porch of the Claremont Inn on Riverside Drive and 125th Street and watch the cruise boats move north to Bear Mountain. On Sunday nights, you will almost certainly turn on the radio and hear that staccato voice: “Goodevening Mr.andMrs. NorthandSouthAmerica andalltheships- atsea.…ThisisWalterWinchellandtheJergensJournal — let’s go to press.…”

Or you can meet that girl in the polo coat who is arriving at Penn Station from college in Vermont or Ohio or Philadelphia. And if you’re lucky, if all goes well at Seventeen Barrow Street or the Bijou or the Olde Knick or the Fleur de Lis, if you have enough money and courage, you might succeed in taking her to the old Ritz Carlton and wake up with her in the bright, snowy light of New York. If it isn’t that easy, you will postpone everything. You will take her to Condon’s, Or to hear Miguelito Valdes sing “Babalu” in the club at the Great Northern Hotel, knowing that upstairs in 1939 William Saroyan wrote The Time of Your Life in five days and maybe the two of you could find the room (in the interests of literature, of course). Maybe you’ll get a sandwich at Reuben’s or stroll through Times Square and look at the Camel sign with the guy blowing smoke rings into the night or the two huge nude statues flanking the waterfall of the Bond Clothes sign and then slip into Toffenetti’s for coffee or head east to Glennon’s for a few final beers. Take your time. All of this will be here tomorrow too. Yeah.