“I appreciate that, Ben. Maybe I’ll let you ghost my autobiography.”
“Write your own damn book.” He laughed hollowly; he looked terrible, dark bags, pallid complexion, second chin sagging over his crisp blue bow tie. “Guess how much we raised for Bodie last night?”
“Five bucks?”
“Oh, much more... twelve.”
I chuckled at this pleasant bad news. “He must have got even cuter after I left, to get such an overwhelming acclamation.”
Ben’s smirk made the fuzzy caterpillar of his mustache wriggle. “He caught his wife coming on to a waiter and started screaming flowery obscenities at her and finally slapped her face. When Ric stepped between them, Ruth slapped him and started shouting, ‘I’m Mrs. Maxwell Bodenheim! I’m Mrs. Maxwell Bodenheim!’” He sighed and shook his head and sipped his Bloody Mary. “I think Max may have made the record books on this one — the only guy in history ever to get thrown out of his own benefit party.”
“He’s a horse’s ass. What possessed you to fly him and his harpy out here, anyway?”
He didn’t answer the question; instead he said, “That was awful, how he crushed that poor kid, last night. Little Marilyn may be built like a brick shithouse, but she’s delicate, you know, underneath that war paint.”
“I know. I’d have knocked the bastard’s teeth out, if he had any.”
Ben snorted a second to that motion, finished his Bloody Mary, and waved a waiter over, telling him we’d have another round before we ordered lunch.
“Don’t be too tough on Bodie,” Ben said. “Language and a sense of superiority are all he has. He doesn’t have money to eat or buy clothes, just words he can use to make other people feel like they’re bums, too.”
“He’s just a mean old drunk.”
Ben shook his head, smiling grimly. “Problem is, kid, there’s a young man in that old skin. He lives in sort of a child’s world filled with word toys. He’s a poet who lives in a world of poetry...”
“He’s a stumblebum who lives in the gutter.”
The waiter brought Ben’s third Bloody Mary. Ben stared into the drink, as if it were a crystal ball into his past. His voice was hushed as he said: “We made a sort of pact, Bodie and I, back when we were young turks, cynical sentimental souls devoted to Art.” A sudden grin. “Ever hear about the time we spoke at this pompous literary society for a hundred bucks? Which was real cabbage in those days...”
“Can’t say I have.”
“We agreed to put on a full-scale literary debate on an important topic. The hall was full of these middle-class boobs, this was in Evanston or someplace, and I got up and said, ‘Resolved: that people who attend literary debates are imbeciles. I shall take the affirmative. The affirmative rests.’ Then Bodie got up and said, ‘You win.’ And we ran off with the hundred.”
I waited till Ben’s laughter at his own anecdote let up before saying, “So you grew up and made some real money, and Peter Pan flew to the gutter. So what?”
Ben sighed again. “I was hoping last night we’d raise some real money for the son of a bitch...”
“Why?”
“Because, goddamnit, I’ve been supporting him for fucking years! He’d send me sonnets and shit, in the mail, and I sent him two hundred bucks a month. Only, I can’t afford it anymore! Not since my career hit the fan.”
“You got no responsibility to underwrite that bum.”
“Not any more, I don’t. Fuck that toothless sot.” He opened the menu. “Let’s order. I’m on expense account with Doubleday...”
4
I had every reason to expect I’d seen and heard the last of Maxwell Bodenheim, and his lovely souse of a spouse, and to take Ben Hecht at his word, that he was finished with subsidizing the bard of Skid Row.
But the first week of February, at the office, I got a call from Ben.
“You want to do another job for me, kid?”
“If it involves Marilyn Monroe.”
“It doesn’t, really. Unless you consider it an extension of what you did for me, before. Did you hear what happened to Bodenheim, after the party at Riccardo’s?”
“You told me,” I reminded him. “He and the missus got tossed out on their deserving backsides.”
“No, I mean after that. Remember how I told you we raised a grand total of twelve bucks for him?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, he spent it on rubbing alcohol. He was found in the gutter the next morning, beaten to shit, with half a bottle of the stuff clutched in his paws.”
“Mugged?”
“I doubt it. More like he’d been mouthing off and got worked over for it.”
“This didn’t make the papers or I’d know about it.”
“See, you don’t know everything that goes on in Chicago, kid. Even out in Hollywood, I know more about the town than you... I got a call from Van Allen Bradley.”
Bradley was literary editor over at the Daily News. He continued: “Seems the lovely Mrs. Bodenheim, Ruth, came around begging for a book review assignment for Max, so they could raise bus fare back to New York.”
“Ben, don’t tell me you flew ’em out one-way, for that benefit?”
“Hell, yes! I expected to raise a couple thousand for the no-good son of a bitch. How did I know he was going to disintegrate in public?”
“Yeah, who woulda guessed that?”
“Anyway, Bradley assigned some new collection of Edna Vincent Millay, and Ruth brought the review in a day or so later. Bradley says it was well written enough, but figures Ruth wrote it, not Bodie. She stood there at Bradley’s desk till he coughed up the dough.”
“They’re a class act, the Bodenheims.”
“Listen, Heller, do you want the job?”
“What is it?”
“In June, back at the ABA, I talked to an editor with a low-end paperback house, about reprinting some of Bodie’s books — you know, that racy stuff about flappers fucking? Slap on cover paintings of sexy babes and Bodie’s back in business. I got nearly two thousand in contracts lined up for him, which is big money for him.”
“So what do you need me for? Just send him the damn contracts.”
“Nate, I can’t find the SOB. He’s a goddamn street bum, floating somewhere around Greenwich Village, or the Bowery. I know for a while he was staying at this farm retreat on Staten Island, for down-and-outers, run by Dorothy Day, with the Catholic Worker? I had a letter from him from there, and I called Dorothy Day and she said Ruth and Bodie showed up on her doorstep, with his arm and leg in a cast from that beating he took. He was there for several months, healing up, and I guess he even managed to sell a poem or two, to the New York Times, if you can believe it, for I guess ten bucks apiece... but Ruth started flirting with some of the male ‘guests,’ and once his leg healed, Bodie dragged his blushing bride back into the city.”
“I’ll line up a man in New York to handle it for you, Ben. It’ll be cheaper.”
“No, Nate — I want you to do this. Yourself. You got some history with Bodie; you might get through to him where somebody else wouldn’t.”
“This could end up costing you more than these contracts are worth.”
“Hey, I had a little upturn. I can afford it. I want to get some money to Bodie without gettin’ back in the routine of me supportin’ him. Anyway, I think it would do him good to see his work back in print.”
I laughed, once. “You really are that bastard’s friend.”
“He doesn’t deserve it, does he?”
“No.”
5
The Waldorf Cafeteria, on Sixth Avenue near Eighth Street, was within a stone’s throw of MacDougal Alley and its quaint studios and New York’s only remaining gas streetlamps, in the midst of one of Greenwich Village’s several centers of nightlife. Here, where skyscrapers were conspicuous in their absence, and brick buildings and renovated stables held sway, countless little bistros and basement boîtes had sprung up on the narrow, chaotically arranged streets like so many exotic mushrooms. Longhaired men and shorthaired women wandered in their dark, drab clothes and sunglasses, moving through a lightly falling snow like dreary ghosts.