Finding Maxwell Bodenheim took exactly one afternoon. I had begun at Washington Square, where I knew he had once pinned his poems to a picket fence for the dimes and quarters of tourists. A bearded creator of unframed modernistic landscapes working the same racket for slightly inflated fees informed me that “Mad Max” (as I soon found all who knew him in the Village referred to him) had given up selling art to the tourist trade.
“He got too weird for the room, man,” the black-overcoat-clad artiste of perhaps twenty-five told me, between alternating puffs of cigarette smoke and cold-visible breath. “You know, too threatening — half-starved looking and drunk and smelly... the Elks won’t do business with a crazy man.”
“The Elks?”
“Out-of-towners, man — you know, Elks and Rotarians and Babbitts. Or cats from Flatbush or the Bronx who let their hair down when they hit Sheridan Square.”
“So what’s Max up to, now?”
“He’s around. Moochin’ drinks and peddlin’ poems for pennies in bars. Been runnin’ the blinkie scam, I heard, with some Bowery cats.”
I didn’t relish hitting that part of town.
“No idea where he lives?”
“Used to be over on Bleecker, but they got evicted. Him and Ruth got busted for sleepin’ on the subway. Didn’t have the twenty-five bucks fine and spent the night in the can.”
“It’s a little cold for doorways and park benches.”
He shrugged. “They probably still got enough friends to flop for free, here and there. Just start hittin’ the coffeehouses and clubs and somebody’ll lead you to him.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Here’s a contribution to the arts.” And slipped him a fin.
I started to walk away and the guy called out, “Hey man! Did you check with Bellevue? He’s been in and out of there.”
“As a nutcase or alcoholic?”
“Take your pick.”
I called Bellevue, but Max wasn’t currently a guest.
So I hit the streets, which were alive with native bohemians and wide-eyed tourists alike — it was Saturday and the dusting of snow wasn’t stopping anybody. I covered a lot of ground in about three hours, entering smoky cellar joints where coffee and cake were served with a side of free verse, stepping around wildly illustrated apocalyptic Bible verses in chalk on the sidewalks outside the gin mills of West Eighth Street, checking out such tourist traps as the Nut Club and Café Society and the Village Barn, gandering briefly at the strippers at Jimmy Kelly’s, stopping in at cubbyhole restaurants that advertised “health food” in conspicuously unhealthy surroundings, but eating instead at the Café Royal, which advertised itself as “The Center of Second Avenue Bohemia” and served up a mean apple strudel. The name Maxwell Bodenheim was familiar to many, from the Café Reggio to the White Horse Pub, but at the Village Vanguard, a deadpan waif with her raven hair in a pixie cut told me to try the Minneta Tavern, where I learned that the San Remo Café on MacDougal Street was Mad Max’s favorite haunt. But at the San Remo, I was sent on to the Waxworks, as the Waldorf Cafeteria was known to hip locals.
What could have possessed the owners of a respectable, pseudo-elegant chain of cafeterias to open a branch in the heart of Bohemia, a place Maxwell Bodenheim had once dubbed “the Coney Island of the soul”? Its wallpaper yellowed and peeling, its “No Smoking” signs defaced and ignored, its once-gleaming fixtures spotted and dull, its floors dirty and littered, its fluorescent lighting sputtered with electrical shorts even while casting a jaundiced glow on the already-sallow faces of a clientele who had taken this cafeteria hostage, turning it from eating place to meeting place. The clatter of dishes and the ring of the pay-as-you-go cash register provided a hard rhythm for the symphony of egos as poets and painters and actors announced their own genius and denounced the lack of talent in others, while occasionally sipping their dime’s worth of coffee while nibbling at sandwiches brought from home, the cheap flats they called “studios.”
Holding forth at a small side table was the man himself, decked out in a World War One vintage topcoat over the same shabby suit and food-flecked tie he’d worn to the Renaissance reunion, months ago. On the table, as if a meal set out for him, was a worn bulging leather briefcase. Sitting beside him was Ruth, in the pale yellow dress she’d worn to Riccardo’s. Both were smoking — Bodie his corncob with that cheap awful tobacco, Ruth with her elbow resting in a cupped hand, cigarette poised near her lips in a royally elegant chain-smoker posture. To the cups of coffee before them Bodenheim was adding generous dollops from a pint of cheap whiskey.
Bodenheim, of course, was talking, and Ruth was nodding, listening, or maybe half-listening; she sat slumped, looking a little bored.
I bought myself a cup of coffee and walked over to them, and bobbed my head toward one of the two untaken chairs at their table. “Mind if I join you?”
As he slipped the pint back in his topcoat pocket, Bodie’s rheumy eyes narrowed in their deep shadowy holes; his lumpy face was the color of tapioca, his cheeks sunken to further emphasize the skull beneath the decaying flesh. Sitting up, pretty Ruth, with her big bedroom eyes, one of which drooped drunkenly, again gave me the once-over, like I was another entrée on the cafeteria serving line.
“My wife and I are having a private conversation,” Bodie said acidly, then cocked his head. “Do I know you, sir?”
“Yes,” I said, sitting down, “from a long time ago, on the West Side of Chicago. But we ran into each other at Riccardo’s last June.”
The thin line of a mouth erupted into a ghastly array of brownish teeth and sporadic gaps. “Heller’s Books! You accompanied that lovely young actress.”
Ruth smirked and snorted derisively, as if compared to her Marilyn Monroe was nothing. Smoke came from her nostrils like dragon’s breath.
“Yes,” I said, “the lovely young actress you humiliated and sent from the room in tears.”
He waved that off with a mottled hand. “That was for that sweet child’s benefit. Cruelty was the kindest gift I could give her.”
“You think?”
“I know.” He patted the bulging briefcase before him. “This is poetry, my poetry, not sentimental drivel, but the work of a serious artist, a distinguished outcast in American letters — hated and feared, an isolated wanderer in the realm of intellect. If I were to encourage the amateurs, the dilettantes, even ones like Miss Monroe, whose skin shimmers like pudding before the spoon goes in, I would lessen both myself and them.”
Ruth cocked her head toward me, rolled her eyes, then winked. She was pretty cute, for a drunk; but I would have had to be pretty drunk, to want to get cute.
“What’s your name?” Ruth asked. Her eyes added “Big Boy.”
“Nate Heller.”
“You’re from Chicago? What brings you to the Village?”
“Ben Hecht asked me to look your husband up.”
That got Bodenheim’s attention and elicited a bitter smirk. “Does my ex-friend wish me to make another cross-country pilgrimage for a twelve-dollar stipend?”
“He’s got a publisher interested in reprinting some of your sex books.”
Ruth’s eyes sobered up and her smile turned from randy to greedy. But the crooked thin line under Bodenheim’s sweet-potato nose was curling into a sneer.