38.
Despite the chill I had Ira put the top down on the Caddy as we sailed downtown in traffic abnormally light for a Saturday night. The assassination seemed to have altered the face of the city. Few people were on the streets. Still, the movies on Forty-Second Street and in Times Square remained open: The Ugly American, Charade, From Russia With Love, The Great Escape, Hud and (with a block-long line) PT-109, starring Cliff Robertson as a wartime JFK; for those who didn’t wish to be reminded of the news there was Irma La Douce, Tom Jones, Bye-Bye Birdie, Flipper and Lassie’s Great Adventure, to say nothing of King Kong vs Godzilla, The Slime People and It Happened At The World’s Fair with none other than Elvis Presley, plus Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor. Yet the streets that met Broadway were filling with theater-goers prepared to be delighted by Richard Burton in Camelot and to split a gut with Zero Mostel in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, along with less-certain results at Stop The World—I Want to Get Off, Brigadoon and Oliver. But beyond these pockets the streets themselves seemed somber, or perhaps only less frivolous. Even the panhandlers had disappeared. The murder of a president is not something people are prepared for, and Kennedy’s successor, despite his decades in Congress, or because of them, was not a known quantity to the average New Yorker. Then there was the all but unspoken question: Who was behind it? Had Oswald acted alone? Was a foreign power involved, as the network television news anchors passively suggested with each new disclosure of the unbelievable details of Oswald’s life—Marine, defector to Moscow, supporter of Fidel Castro—or was it all a right-wing conspiracy cooked up by the proto-fascist wizards of Dallas, or the Mafia, or... No one knew. The shadow hanging over the city was not mourning. It was the uneasiness of the uninformed: uncertainty, doubt, suspicion, palpable fear.
As we drove down Fifth Avenue into the Village the normally buzzing streets were all but unpopulated save for a handful of young couples scurrying down the pavements outside the Church of the Ascension at Tenth Street and lonely young men carrying guitar cases strapped to their backs like centurions retreating behind their shields. A few disconsolate transvestites stood chattering in the cold at the corner of Eighth Street, the Village’s main drag in both senses. At Sixth a squadron of Hell’s Angels revved their Harleys. Further down an interracial couple, arm in arm, turned into the doorway of the massive apartment house at One Fifth Avenue, the doorman showering spit on the pavement as he closed the glass door behind them.
“I was listening through the door,” Justo said practically under his breath from where he sat between Ira and me. “Shushan, he would be proud. Chinga, you did it beautiful.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Ira, if the president’s dead or not we should have some music, right?”
The big man turned on the radio, which took a moment to warm up. This was pretty much the last of the tube radios. Micro-electronics were coming in. The remorseless march of technology would soon become the dominant factor of American life, ultimately to become a fetish whose roots lay in the space race with the Soviet Union, which the year before had beat the US to the moon. It was the dawn of a new age. I hardly noticed.
I will follow him,
No matter where he goes
Ira pressed a button.
Hello mudda, hello fadda
“What the fuck music is that?” I said. We were coming to Washington Square, on the edges spilling with people who, from the way they clumped together, had probably gathered spontaneously. Over the gag song on the radio I could now hear the cacaphony of plucked strings and plaintive strummed chords that was the feeble public mourning of the young and the would-be young. Though I didn’t quite share the views of Shushan Cats and Auro Sfangiullo regarding the now slain president, neither had I cared much for the man. There was something wrong there that a glamorous wife and well-cut suits could not quite hide.
“That’s Allan Sherman—it’s a funny song about summer camp.”
“I’ve never been,” I said.
“Yeah, but it’s funny,” Ira said. “The kid is—”
“Change it back,” I said.
“But boss—”
“But boss nothing. It’s not music.”
By this time the Miracles had disappeared from WABC and the Crystals were into their sweet driving lyrics, senseless drivel and pure longing at the same time. I suppose the song was about desire. No one who heard it, loved it and sung along really knew or cared. It was the nature of doo-wop: the lyrics could be in Estonian.
I met him on a Monday and my heart stood still
Da doo ron ron ron, da doo ron ron
Somebody told me that his name was Bill
Da doo ron ron ron, da doo ron ron
Yeah my heart stood still
Yeah his name was Bill
And when he walked me home
Da doo ron ron ron, da doo ron ron
Yeah he looks so fine
Yeah I’ll make him mine
And when he walked me home
Da doo ron ron ron, da doo ron ron
“Boss,” Ira said as we stopped at the light.
“Listen to this guy, Justo. He’s growing a mouth.”
“I’m entitled to my own opinion, ain’t I?”
“Not while I’m in the car, Ira.”
“But...”
“Who’s the boss, Ira?”
“You are, boss.”
“So suffer,” I said.
As we turned the corner I could see the park was packed, maybe more than a thousand people, most of whom seemed to be armed with instruments: guitars, mandolins, banjos, zithers, harmonicas, concertinas, bongo drums. At school I’d mostly just tolerated the folk scene, flannel shirts, carefully torn jeans, bad haircuts, no haircuts. Now I felt an odd kinship with these lost souls who had seized upon a dying tradition—in 1963 rock was ascendant, jazz still hip, but folk was just plain goofy—to create a bridge to a simpler past.
These were the sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters of the Bhotke Society, of the Knights of Columbus, the Ancient Order of Hibernians and every other immigrant group in the city, the native-born generation having turned its collective back on the discredited culture of their parents—except for food, because tastes formed in childhood could not so easily be negated—to become un-hyphenated Americans. City of immigrants, New York was the center of the folk music renaissance, where a Robert Zimmerman become Bob Dylan, and where countless Goldmans and Manellis and O’Keefes identified not with the old country but with the makers of Appalachian ballads, Texas cowboy serenades and the labor hymns of Colorado miners.
“What are they so Chinga sad about?” Justo asked no one.
“They lost a hero.”
“But he was a shit.”
“They don’t know that,” I said. “It’s all image. We know only what we think we know.”
“Chinga,” Justo said. “I hope Shushan ain’t dead.”
A moment of silence while the Crystals rounded on. “Me too,” I said, but for the first time wondered if I meant it. Uncertainty, doubt, not knowing what I knew or didn’t—I had been living with this for a week.
But by the time we pulled up to the restaurant with the chickens and geese and who knows what other creatures hanging in the steamy window like crimson mummies, I realized that it didn’t matter. Shushan Cats could be sitting at a table inside waiting for me, smiling, laughing, taking everything back, and I would still never know certainty again. One way or the other, I had busted out of my cocoon. I was in the world. Nothing would be as it was. I was coming to like it.
The three countermen greeted me with raised meat-cleavers, grinning over uniformly crooked brown teeth; it was clear I had replaced Shushan in their eyes. Yet if they had even noticed me before it was fleeting, just another face in Shushan’s entourage—did everyone in New York now know who I was, and how did they know when I was just finding out?
Except for one large table in the rear hidden by a screen, where I could just about make out a small party sitting at a large round table, the restaurant was empty. Four waiters stood like a frieze at the rear wall, napkins on their sleeves, smiling in welcome beneath an enormous Chinese poster celebrating a hydroelectric dam. It was eight-thirty on a Saturday night. Why was the restaurant empty? Were all lovers of Hunan cuisine in mourning for Shushan Cats?
Then Jimmy Wing came up, thin and durable as only an ascetic Chinese can be in a Carnaby Street suit, and ushered me to the table behind the screen, where Royce and the brothers were already settled down with an open bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, with them Jimmy’s mute companion, Tommy, and an older Chinese who sat almost motionless, as though waiting for food to be brought to his lips.
“We took over the place for the evening,” Jimmy said, winking. “Otherwise too noisy.”