I drove down the hill from the doctor’s office and into North Albany. When I reached Pearl Street Billy said, “Go down Main Street. I want to see what it looks like.”
Billy’s grandfather Joe Farrell (they called him Iron Joe because two men broke their knuckles on his jaw) had lived at the bottom of Main Street, and also had run a saloon, The Wheelbarrow, next to his home. The house was gone but the saloon building still stood, a sign on it noting the headquarters of a truckers’ union. Trucking companies had replaced the lumber yards as the commerce along Erie Boulevard, the filled-in bed of the old canal.
“I wouldn’t know the place,” Billy said. “I never get down here anymore.” He’d been born and raised on Main Street.
“Lot of memories here for you,” I said.
“I knew how many trees grew in those lots over there. I knew how many steps it took to get from Broadway to the bottom of the hill. The lock house on the canal was right there.” And he pointed toward open space. “Iron Joe carried me on his shoulder over the bridge to the other side of the lock.”
Implicit but unspoken in Billy’s memory was that this was the street his father fled after dropping his infant son and causing his death. I was close to Billy, but I’d never heard him mention that. He and I are first cousins, sons of most peculiar brothers, I the unacknowledged bastard of Peter Phelan, Billy the abandoned son of Francis Phelan, both fathers flawed to the soul, both in their errant ways worth as much as most martyrs.
Billy was still looking at where his house had been when I turned onto the road that led to the filtration plant. It was busy with heavy equipment for the dig; also a police car was parked crossways in the road. A policeman got out of the car and raised his hand to stop us. Billy knew him, Doggie Murphy.
“Hey, Dog,” Billy said. “We came to see the elephants.”
“Can’t go through, Billy.”
“What’s goin’ on?”
“They found bones.”
“I know they found bones. I read the paper.”
“No, other bones. Human bones.”
“Oh yeah?”
“So nobody comes or goes till the coroner gets here.”
“Whose bones are they?”
“Somebody who don’t need ’em anymore,” Doggie said.
And so I swung the car around and headed for Sport Schindler’s, where I would have my eye opened whether it needed it or not. Sport was pushing sixty, a retired boxer who had run this saloon for thirty-five years, keeping a continuity that dated to the last century. The place had a pressed-tin ceiling, a long mahogany bar with brass rail, shuffleboard, dart board, and years of venerable grime on the walls. Apart from the grime it was also unusually clean for a saloon, and a haven for the aging population of Broadway. A poster at one end of the bar showed two sixtyish, wrinkled, white-haired naked women, both seated with hands covering their laps, both wearing glasses, both with an enduring shapeliness and a splendid lack of sag. Centered over the back bar was the mounted head of a cow, shot in Lamb’s lot by Winker Wilson, who thought it was a rabbit.
Billy had lived for years in the night world of Broadway, where Schindler’s was a historic monument. But times were changing now with the press of urban renewal by squares and straights who had no use at all for Billy’s vanishing turf. Also, the open horserooms of Albany had moved underground when the racing-information phone line was shut off by pressure from the Governor, and the only action available now was by personal phone call or handbook. Bookies, to avoid being past-posted, paid off only on the race results in tomorrow’s newspaper. What the hell kind of a town is it when a man can’t walk in off the street and bet a horse?
Sport Schindler’s looked like an orthopedic ward when we settled in. Billy sat at the end of the bar, his right foot in his plaster cast partially covered by white sock and trouser cuff, his hickory cane dangling from the edge of the bar. Up the bar was a man whose complete right leg was in a cast elevated on another stool, a pair of crutches leaning against the bar beside him.
Billy earned his cast riding in a car whose windshield somebody hit with a rock, scaring hell out of the driver, who drove into a tree. Billy broke his ankle putting on the brakes in the back seat. “You ain’t safe noplace in this world,” Billy concluded.
The man with the crutches was Morty Pappas, a Greek bookie who had been a casualty of the state-police crackdown on horserooms. Instead of booking on the sneak, Morty took his bankroll and flew to Reno with a stripper named Lulu, a dangerous decision, for Lulu was the most favored body of Buffalo Johnny Rizzo, the man who ran the only nightclub strip show in town. Morty came back to Albany six months after he left, flush with money from a streak of luck at the gaming tables, but minus Lulu and her body. Rizzo welcomed Morty back by shooting him in the leg, a bum shot, since he was aiming at Morty’s crotch. Rizzo went to jail without bail, the shooting being his third felony charge in four years. But it had come out in the morning paper that by court order he was permitted bail; and so Buffalo Johnny was back in circulation.
Billy was offering Morty even money that the bones found up at the filtration plant were not elephant bones, Billy’s argument based in his expressed belief that they never let elephants hang around Albany.
“Whataya mean they never let ’em hang around,” Morty said. “Who’s gonna tell an elephant he can’t hang around?”
“You want the bet or don’t you?” Billy asked.
“They found tusks with the bones.”
“That don’t mean nothin’,” Billy said.
“Who else got tusks outside of elephants?”
“Joey Doyle and his sister.”
“You’re so sure gimme two to one,” said Morty.
“Six to five is all I go.”
“You’re right and the newspaper’s wrong, is that it?”
“What I’m sayin’ is six to five.”
“You got a bet,” said Morty, and Billy looked at me and winked.
I couldn’t figure out why Billy was so hot to bet against elephants, but neither could I bet against Billy, for I was his kinsman in more ways than one. Someone once remarked that Billy had lived a wastrel’s useless life, which struck me as a point of view benightedly shrouded in uplift. I always found this world of Broadway to be the playground of that part of the soul that is impervious to any form of improvement not associated with chance, and relentlessly hostile to any conventional goad toward success and heaven. I remember years ago standing with Billy and Sport Schindler as a Fourth of July parade went past Sport’s place on Broadway. A stranger beside us, seeing a Boy Scout troop stepping along, remarked, “What a fine bunch of boys.” Sport took his cigar out of his mouth to offer his counterpoint: “Another generation of stool pigeons,” he said.
That was years ago, and now here I was again with Sport and Billy and their friends, and those Scouts had grown up to become the lawyers, bankers, and politicians who had forced Sport to sell his saloon so they could level the block and transform it into somebody else’s money. The Monte Carlo gaming rooms were gone, another victim of the crackdown: end of the wheel-and-birdcage era on Broadway; Louie’s pool room was empty, only Louie’s name left on the grimy windows; Red the barber had moved uptown and so you couldn’t even get shaved on the street anymore; couldn’t buy a deck of cards either, Bill’s Magic Shop having given way to a ladies’ hat store. A ladies’ hat store. Can you believe it, Billy?
Also Becker’s Tavern had changed hands in the early fifties, and after that nobody paid any attention to the photographic mural behind the bar, mural of two hundred and two shirt-sleeved men at a 1932 clambake. Nobody worried anymore about pasting stars on the chests of those men after they died, the way old man Becker used to. One by one the stars had gone up on those chests through the years; then sometimes a star would fall and be carried off by the sweeper. Stars fell and fell, but they didn’t rise anymore, and so now the dead and the quick were a collage of uncertain fates. Hey, no star on his chest, but ain’t he dead? Who knows? Who gives a goddamn? Put a star on him, why not? Put a star on Becker’s.