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Still Circling Moose Jaw
by Richard Bissell
Chapter One
“Zsa Zsa Gabor has discovered the secret of perpetual middle age.”
-- Oscar Levant
New York is a Festival both winter and summer and we all know it because we who live there all have sore feet and indigestion just like at the Fall Festival back home. Mother came over from Cincinnati one time and broke the rule: she said it was a terrible place to visit. And any fool could see that that Empire State building was going to fall down someday and a lot of people would get hurt.
“Like the Johnstown Flood,” she said.
“But Mother, New York is a Festival,” I said. “It’s a feast of Art, Intellect, and Romance.”
“Remember that Mrs. Roy Kramer?” Mother replied. “I introduced you to her at the Fall Festival one time? She fell off a step-ladder last week and broke her leg in two places.”
“That’s terrible,” I said. “Now listen Mother, come on, how did you like the Guggenheim?”
“Couldn’t they have picked a different name for it?” she said. “It sounds like a clothing store.”
Mother didn’t like my palatial home in Greenwich, Connecticut, either, although I live very high and have an expensive gardener who steals my peat moss and sells it to a lady in Westport. Mother said if they were going to pronounce it Grenitch why didn’t they spell it that way.
However Mother is an exception in her reaction to all these metropolitan and suburban delights and she isn’t even willing to try. She won’t work at it. Now I admit that New York City has not yet opened her arms and her kimono and revealed her dazzling charms to me but at least I work at it. Hopefully I work at it, even slavishly.
“There is no other place to live,” my friends say, and all the Sunday magazine sections say the same thing, with pictures.
“Where else is there to live?” my friends say as they stand in the rain trying vainly to hail a cab.
I could tell them a few other places there are to live but I don’t because then I wouldn’t get invited out to dinner any more to have quiche lorraine and talk about the Strike (never mind which one, there is always at least one) and where we all ate lunch. Then we talk about whether Television is spoiling the kids and whether eating carrots is good for the eyes and other big-city topics. And that’s another reason why everybody wants to live in Gotham.
As for myself I have been making eyes at New York for fifteen years now but so far I might as well be Fats Kugelmeyer the class dope, for all she cares.
But I never let on and I never give up and on this rainy afternoon I was sitting in the bar in my Club hoping.
“You know something, Wally?” Ned said. “Snow tires are just a racket.”
“What makes you say that, Ned?” I said.
“I’d like to see anybody get up my driveway in Darien last Saturday night after that snow we had,” T. J. said. “Without snow tires.”
“Nevertheless . . .” Ned said.
This time I had been working at loving New York for three days and nights. And she had shown no inclination to blow me a kiss although altogether in three days I had spent six hundred dollars which was my entire annual wages back in 1935 when I was deckhand on the steamer Omar down on the Ohio River.
How did I spent six hundred dollars in only 3 days trying to get a smile out of Miss New York? Just as easy. It was easier actually than spending a quarter in Kresge’s dime store when I was a kid, which took a lot of thought and you had to ask the sales girl to take your money. You don’t have to ask, in New York.
In the first place I checked in at the Biltmore. I like the Biltmore all right and you must admit it’s very close to the trains.
“Nice to have you with us again, Mr. Dixon,” the clerk said. “How’s everything in the country?”
“Perfectly awful,” I said.
“You can have your regular suite if you like,” he said, “Mr. Dixon.”
“O.K.,” I said, and went to the news stand with the botones behind me carrying my perfectly beautifully matched luggage.
Since the newspaper strike was on I bought a copy of the Boston Herald.
“Hello, Mr. Dixon,” the girl said. “Are you going to read that?”
“No Shirley, I have to have something to wrap my shoes in,” I said.
“How’s everything out in the country?” she said.
“Fierce. Just terrible,” I said.
I had a gourmet lunch with two other gourmets, one in the cement business and the other a vendor of used vehicles from New Jersey.
Now I had been in town about three hours and I was down sixty bucks already. I don’t care because I can afford it, I am just explaining where it goes to.
That night Harry Fox and Neil Friedlander and I got together for dinner and after that Harry wanted to see a show so we got some tickets for about 50 bucks and then Harry didn’t like the show and Neil fell asleep so we left at the intermission, went to the Village to find this perfectly terrific bar that Harry had been to last time he was in town (Harry comes from Cleveland and is in the plastic button business). Harry couldn’t remember the name of the place so we all went back uptown again and caused a disturbance at “21” and then went to the Playboy Club to play. You know how much playing you do there besides playing with your wallet. It is all very embarrassing. If you devour the girls with lustful lingering stares or careful clinical analysis you feel like a dirty old man or a kid at his first burlesque show and if you don’t, what’s the use of being there? It is all pretty sickly and may be what’s the matter with this country although Eisenhower says it is indolence and lack of moral principle that is our trouble.
Harry and Neil acted about the way you would expect. Neil got very courtly and dignified in the presence of all the flesh and net stockings, whereas Harry went to pieces and started blubbering about his dead father, with whom it seems he had had a very serious argument the day before he died, about opening a branch button plant down on the Ohio River at Parkersburg. He also gave a brief resume of the decline and fall of the fresh water pearl button business. A good deal later I decided to test my manhood as a tribute to New York, for according to the books and magazines you have to commit sexual intercourse daily or more often in N.Y. to qualify as a sophisticate. I went down to this place I know off Fifth Ave. pretty far down the street.
I sat at the bar and pretty soon the boss came over.
“Hey is Gretchen here any more?” I said.
“Listen,” he said. “I got a girl here you’ll love her. She’s positively dynamite. She’s a volcano.”
“Where’s Gretchen?” I said.
“She ain’t here no more. Listen this girl I’m talking about she’ll break your back, man.”
“O.K.,” I said. “Haven’t had my back busted in ages.”
I had to buy a bottle of champagne. That was the house rules. “What’s your name honey?” I said.
“Lucille,” she said.
We went up to the Biltmore.
“They’re terribly sensitive,” she said. “Take it easy, that’s better.”
She was a volcano, all right. And pretty soon the room was all full of sparks, hunks of red hot rock flying through the air, and the molten lava began to run under the door, down the hall, and into the elevator shaft.
It worked out all right but it cost me fifty dollars and I gave her a ten dollar bonus for being so active and so cute and two dollars for the cab back. I didn’t want her to think (or rather know) that I was a cheapskate.
So altogether the first day cost me about two hundred bucks. At no time during the day had I felt any chills jumping up and down my spine with the joy of living. The official and approved New York ecstasies were being withheld. Outside it was raining and I have seen better views from any hotel window in La Crosse, Wisconsin, which is not a town that anybody visits so they can send postcards home. Lucille had left her lipstick behind, — it sat there on the thick plate glass shelf in the bathroom. It looked very sad.
“Everything will be O.K.,” I said, “when I see Angela. That’s all I need.
Nothing can possibly be dull with Angela.”
And I turned off the light and smoked a perfectly nauseating cigarette, the end of a day-long chain of thousands, each cutting another five minutes off my valuable life.
“Angela,” I said, “Angela. Angela is an angel. Aren’t you baby? An angel with. . . .”
And the New York humming began outside. That eerie hum from a deserted power station on a spook iceberg. No it is not the garbage trucks, nor the lonesome taxicabs. It’s just that hum hum hum from those electric ghost motors on that deserted iceberg. It goes on all night and no one knows what it is. They pretend they can’t hear it.
The next day I veered away from the merchandising set and sought out the sporting crowd for some hearty handclasps, he-male jokes, big steaks with blood all over, and cuff links like poker hands. I made Downey’s, Dinty Moore’s, Jack Dempsey’s (just to give you an example of the extent of my basic immaturity, I get a real kick out of it every time I shake Jack’s hand, it’s like shaking hands with U. S. Grant or something), and then I made the Shamrock and the Paddock and ended up at Gallagher’s with some of the boys.
No matter how hard I work at it though, nobody ever says of me, “He’s a sporting man.” I would like that, except for having to watch all those games. These friends of mine are sporting men and they have pads of big bills in their pockets. They not only know all the hockey and basketball scores but they know all the players’ names, if you can imagine anything much more tedious than that. Then they talk about Sonny Liston and the boxing rules in their hoarse whiskey voices.
There is a good deal of ponderous kidding and thunderous straightfaced stuff going on all the time.
“I hate to see you men standing at a bar.”
“Hey Charlie is that coat camel’s hair or part camel’s hair?”
(Charlie responds with a Jack Benny pained deadpan.)
The drinking was ferocious and red faces were 10¢ a dozen. By 3 p.m. we had had eleven hi-balls apiece with only a club sandwich and I mean good sportsmanlike 2 oz. hi-balls none of your pathetic non-sporting 1 or 1 1/2 oz. balls. Somehow we were on 64th Street trying to find Buddy Baxter’s new Chinese girl.
“You think you ever saw a beauty-ful girl do you,” Buddy kept saying. “So you think you ever saw a beauty-ful girl do you? Well listen here to me what I’m telling you you never saw such a beauty-ful girl in your life as this girl. She’s Chinese see, and beauty-ful, man I’m telling you something. Remember that Monica, remember Monica from Buffalo? Well let me tell you Monica was plain downright homely alongside this girl.”
“Aw come on now Buddy, that Monica was some looker.”
“Yeah sure she was. I ain’t saying she wasn’t. What I’m saying is, this here Chinese girl she is a dozen times hell a hundred times better looking than Monica. And listen, is she wild! She just don’t give a damn. Not her. I’m telling you here and now there isn’t ANYTHING this girl won’t do. Mixed company don’t bother her a bit. Stand too close she’ll peel the paint off your fenders. And beauty-ful! Listen, I been around a bit. Buddy’s been in Old New York for awhile. And in old Miami. I’m telling you boys the God’s truth. I hope I may fall down dead in my tracks if this girl is not the most . . .”
The most beauty-ful girl in the universe was not at her pad and we went to about six bars where she might be, but she wasn’t in any of them so I never did see her in or out of mixed company, wild or tame. It was another case of missing the boat. She might have been the key to New York, and most probably would have been. And when I went into the Algonquin lounge with her after the theater they would say “It’s Dixon and he’s with Her again. She’s the most beauty-ful woman in the world. Leonard Lyons said so only yesterday.” And then somebody would say, “What’s Dixon do?” and somebody else would say, “He’s this fabulously wealthy mystery man who is happy all the time.”
Shadows were falling over Central Park as we entered the Athletic Club and we were a very sporting group in our polo coats, chesterfields, snappy vests, highly polished calfskins, and surrounded by a dense fog of bourbon fumes. One by one, though, as the gloaming changed to night and the night to early morning, they all drifted away, as everybody does in New York. They got misplaced, they rolled off into corners of the city like marbles under the parlor sofa. They faded in the direction of obscure destinations, to apartments or flats or houses or suites I would never see, to wives I would never see, — there to hang their fancy vests over a wooden coathanger carefully. They simply vanished and you might not see any of them for months, or years, or perhaps ever again. But perhaps you would meet one in the Club House at the track a few years later, or in somebody’s box at the ball game, or watching the tennis, or the golf, or the football, — and he would still be redfaced and still with the bourbon perfume and the onyx cuff links and the thick wad of 20s and 50s in his pants pocket and he would say:
“Hey, fella, hey bo, where you been? Hey what you been doing? Say, remember that afternoon hunting for Buddy Baxter’s Chinese dame? God what a riot. Well, too bad about Buddy . . .
On asking what is too bad about Buddy you find out Buddy is dead, that’s what’s the matter with Buddy, and that’s the way these conversations always end except for gratuitous incidents concerning his last illness and some cheery remarks along the line of “They say his suffering was terrible.”
Much later Buster Bailey played his clarinet at the Metropole, Red Allen split my head with his trumpet, Cozy Cole grinned and grinned as his drums exploded in a thousand pieces which fell into the watery hi-balls. In front of Nedick’s on 44th Street and Times Square there was an altercation in Spanish, scuffling, and then a man in a topcoat lying on the sidewalk, his grey fedora rolling down the gutter and into the square, and there was a girl bending over him, a girl with black black eyes, — a ferocious girl. I toasted the victor in a pina-colada and tossed a doughnut over the Times bldg.
I went back to the Biltmore and so ended the second day of Dixon’s Quest. Lucille’s lipstick was still on the thick plate glass shelf above the bowl. The chambermaid had put the cap on it but it looked lonelier than ever. “Angel
a,” I said, “there is a very lonely little old lipstick on the glass shelf in the bathroom of my luxurious suite at the Hotel Biltmore in New York City. And furthermore Angela, you are an angel with your . . .”
Sleet peppered the window.
All of a sudden the mirror fell, the furniture did the bossanova, and the wall split wide open with a squeak, and through the crumbling plaster I looked into the next room. A smartly turned out usherette was directing the crowd to their seats. They threw jellybeans at the screen, waiting for the trained dog act, Rubinoff and his violin, and the Singer midgets.
GUILTY appeared on the screen in 26 languages.
What’s the charge? Let’s hear the charge.
Theft of a packet of matches bearing the legend Shamrock Bar and Grill 781 Third Avenue. Refusal to look at the new line of ladies’ resort wear in the 5th Ave. show windows of Saks Fifth Avenue. Taking candy away from baby Melvin Feinstein, Age 2, on the northeast corner of 74th Street and Broadway at 3:10 p.m. January 12th. Throwing spitballs in manual training class. Indulged in off-color daydream featuring self and redhead observed in Stern’s greeting card department. Squeezed naughty Nellie behind the branch power station. Fell asleep in Italian movie. Tracked mud all over Mother’s nice clean kitchen floor. Stole two sticks of Blony gum from sister Florence. Kissed the girls and made them cry. Sat in chairs at W. & J. Sloane’s furniture emporium with no intention of buying. Complained to waitress because cup of Chock Full O' Nuts coffee contained no nuts. Wore clamp skates on Rockefeller Center rink and played solo hockey with shinny stick and tomato can. Threw paper airplane from third tier at Metropolitan Opera, striking tenor in left ear.
Case Dismissed. Defendant awarded trip to Hollywood.
MONTAGE of Hollywood scenes, followed by:
Picture of William S. Hart.
Hart: Good-bye.
Picture of Tom Mix and Tony the Wonder Horse.
Mix: Good-bye.
Profile shot of John Barrymore.
Barrymore: (Censored by NJ. Board of Review).
Long Shot of Gary Cooper.
Closeup of Gary Cooper.
Coop: Good-bye.
Med. Shot of Ernest Hemingway.
Papa: Good-bye.
Iris in on Marilyn.
Marilyn (in tears): Good-bye.
