April 24, 1965
I made Bubbles forty-eight hours later, the day after the Dutchman finally quit. Agnes and I were married on December 3, 1935. I was forty-three, she was thirty-four. We’re still married.
Incredibly no one died in the Palace Chop House that night. They all made it to Newark City Hospital, and then one by one they checked out. First the magnificent brain of Otto Berman shut down just before three in the morning, then the lionhearted Landau followed him into eternity about four and a half hours later. Even with all that lead in him, Lulu managed to hang on until early in the morning of October 25, just about the time I was pulling into Hot Springs, my hands clean and my conscience clear. After all, I didn’t kill nobody. The doctors failed to save them.
I heard later that Dutch had a few things to get off his chest before he went, which I guess is true of all of us who get more than a couple of seconds of reflection before the curtain falls. They got a stenographer into his room to take down what he was saying. It never ceases to amaze me that, at a time like this, the bulls will sit there and ask a man who’s half-dead and out of his noodle the same dumb question: “Who shot you?” As if a mug like the Dutchman would tell them, because the real gangster’s answer is always the same: “Nobody shot me.”
I know.
“Please make it fast and furious…I will be checked and double-checked and please pull for me…Oh, I forgot I am plaintiff and not defendant…They are Englishmen and they are a type. I don’t know who is best, they or us…A boy has never wept…nor dashed a thousand kim…Mother is the best bet, and don’t let Satan draw you too fast.” Poetry, if you ask me. The Dutchman’s last words were: “I want to pay, let them leave me alone,” and he finally settled his account about eight-thirty in the evening.
But not before he got his wish to become Catholic. Father Cornelius McInerney baptized him and gave him the last rites bang-bang, one after another, snatching Arthur Flegenheimer from Satan’s jaws once and for all. Most of us can look forward to quite a space between baptism and extreme unction, but the Dutchman got it all over within a couple of minutes. He was always efficient.
Since it was my Arrangement, I had him buried up at the Gate of Heaven cemetery in Yonkers, in hallowed ground and with a tallis around his shoulders. Talk about covering your bets. Dutch’s grave is still there, not far from Larry Fay’s. I wish I could be with them when my time comes, but Agnes won’t hear of it, so I’m slated for planting in the family plot in Greenwood Cemetery down here. Among the Protestants, that’s where you’ll find me—quite a fate for a boy who lived his life among his peoples, the Catholics and the Jews.
Frenchy died in September of 1939 in his rooms at the Warwick Hotel, heart attack, what were the odds at his age. He’d just got back from the spread that “Mr. Fox” and Jane had in Florida and was going over some numbers when the odds caught up with him.
We gave him a hell of a send-off, like in the old days, you woulda thought it was Chicago during the reign of the Big Fella, flowers, hearses, the works: six open cars chockablock with flowers, me in the third car, all the way from the Simons Funeral Parlor to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, way up, near the Yonkers line and Van Cortlandt Park, which some people called Vannie but I didn’t. “You helped everybody,” my arrangement said, “God will help you.” At the funeral I met George’s real wife and kids for the first time. He had a daughter, who wrote me for money later. I gave it to her.
I managed to get in and out of town without any trouble that time, but then that fat little goo-goo La Guardia called a press conference and solemnly swore to all the coyotes that if I so much as set a toenail in the great City of New York again, he’d have me arrested on the spot for vagrancy. Mr. Fusion: half-Jewish, half-Republican, and neither half a good half.
“Excuse me, Your Honor?” said one of the reporters. “Did you say for ‘fragrancy’?” You see what I’d had to put up with all those years.
Arrested I was too, a whole bunch of times. You could argue that I wasn’t quite keeping my half of the bargain, but then I didn’t really expect the feds to keep theirs.
Mostly I visited the city to go to the fights, in which I still had plenty of interest and interests. My tomato can Camera went all the way to the title, thanks to the fights we fixed, but like with most sad sacks, things went wrong for Camera. He was in with Ernie Schaaf, a nice fighter, and clipped him with a light right, just the way he was told to, and Schaaf was being paid to take a dive anyway, but nobody had told us that Schaaf, who’d been smacked around pretty good by Maxie Baer in his previous bout, was concealing an injury—his head wasn’t right—and so when the big Powder Puff tagged him, he fell down like he was shot.
“Nice act,” said Frenchy, who was sitting beside me at the Garden, but I could see Schaaf’s legs twitching, the sight I always hated, and then they fetched a stretcher and rushed him to Polyclinic, where the great Rothstein had expired, and where he lasted a couple of days in a coma and died. I sent Schaaf’s family ten grand, anonymously, I felt so bad for the chump.
We put old Satchel Feet in with Baer for his next title defense, and the long and the short of it is I laid a couple of hundred grand on Maxie, no strings attached, and he put Primo on his can eleven times until finally the ref stopped what the papers the next day called the “Comedy Battle,” and that was the end of Camera. We shipped him home to Italy, where they say Mussolini stole all his money. Shalleck told me later that somebody wrote a book about it. All’s I know is, don’t blame me.
Maxie was a good-lookin’ lad who liked dolls better than he liked training. Joe Gould decided to replace him with Jimmy Braddock, the Cinderella Man, a light-heavy moving up in class who decisioned Max in fifteen at the Garden on June 13, 1935, just before I left town. I won a bundle on that one and so did Maxie. “You know I never bet on anything unless it’s a fight and I know what round I’m going down in,” he told me. Smart fighter.
Braddock was my last champ. Prizefighters, like gangsters, don’t last very long: the public gets bored easily, whether your map is on the cover of Ring magazine or hanging up in the post office. We wanted Jimmy to go out on top and the one who gave me the idea of how to do it was Mae West herself, who turned up in Bubbles, sitting plump and pretty in one of the suites at the Arlington. As luck would have it, Agnes was visiting a sick relative or something, and so I strolled across the street to spend some time with her. After we’d spent our time, she rolled over and said, “I got a favor to ask you.”
She pulled her nightgown around her shoulders. It’s funny that Mae was always sensitive about her figure, her being a big movie star and all. “There’s this colored boy I been seein’.”
“Yeah?”
“Pugilist. Well equipped for the title.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Everybody’s ducking him like it was the first of the month.”
“You mean Louis. The Brown Bomber.”
“I got other names for him.” She turned back toward me, her nightdress splaying open, and I got an eyeful of two of the things I’d always admired about Mae and then we visited some more.
Then I picked up the phone and called Mike Jacobs, the promoter associated with the Twentieth Century Club, and made the deal for a title bout, Braddock-Louis. Braddock knew he didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance against a puncher like Joe Louis, but I softened the blow by telling him about the deal I’d made with Jacobs. Not only would he get his usual slice of the gate, but he’d also get ten percent of Jacobs’s share of everything Louis would ever earn as a champion. That was a deal nobody could say no to.
I told Jimmy to make it look good, and he did. Chicago, June 22, 1937. He dropped Joe in the first round, put him down right on his brown backside, but Joe rallied as we all knew he would and took Jimmy out in the eighth, busted his nose, closed both his eyes. Jimmy had one more fight after that, a ten-round decision over Tommy Farr, and then retired. A hell of a mug.
I don’t want you to get the impression that all the fights were fixed back then, just the ones that counted. Went up for the Marciano-Moore fight in September of 1955, forty-buck ringside seat at Yankee Stadium, courtesy of Al Weill, the champ’s manager. Al wrote to me the week before the fight, with this prediction: “I figure this to be tough fight in the early rounds, but the Champ should come on strong in the middle and finish him in the later rounds.” That Al was some kind of prognosticator, because sure enough Archie floored the champ early, but the Rock came back and took him out in the ninth. Marciano retired undefeated after that fight, two million bucks to the good. It was worth getting rousted to see that.
I bring this up because while you trust a fixed fight, you couldn’t trust Washington, and those politocos who are always screaming about cleaning up the fight game wouldn’t dare to apply the same dudgeon to themselves or their own rackets.
Take what happened to Lepke, fried at Sing Sing. Wouldn’t ya know it, that fink Winchell was involved, got Lepkeleh to surrender to none other than that fairy Hoover, Edgar not Herbert, on the condition he got to dodge the Big Rap in New York State, but of course the feds double-crossed him. That was in March of 1944. A Presidential election year, and guess who was still running for President?
Which pretty much explains this: Lepkeleh got a forty-eight-hour stay from my old friend Tom Dewey, now sitting pretty as Governor of New York, when he claimed to have information on various rackets that could reach all the way to the White House. I knew that meant all the way to “Clear it with Sidney” Hillman, chief of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, which meant all the way to Roosevelt, and sure enough, they stayed Louis just long enough to find out everything he knew and then they fried him anyway.
The day Lepke died they also jacked up the juice for Louis Capone and Mendy Weiss, who went down not for the Dutchman hit but a whack job on some stoolie named Rosen. Charles the Bug got life and was let out last year after a mere twenty-two years in a Jersey stir. Like me, he got left behind when Piggy the Putz took off, and had to make his way back to New York, where they picked him up with blood all over his hands. He took it like a man. When it was clear the fix was in at his trial, he stood up, switched his plea from not guilty to non vult and told the judge: “I, Charles Workman, being of the opinion that any witness called in my defense will be intimidated and arrested by members of the District Attorney’s office or police officials and not wishing members of my family and others to be subjected to humiliation on my account, do hereby request no witnesses in my defense except myself.”
Deny, deny, deny—and when you can’t deny any longer, when they got you dead to rights, attack the cops and the prosecutors. I was so proud of the Bug that I took care of his family for all the years he was in the slammer.
Three years after Dutch went down, Jimmy Hines got busted by Dewey for protecting the Dutchman’s policy rackets. He was tried, convicted and sent to Sing Sing for four years. Everybody figured with his connections he’d soon be sprung, but Roosevelt let him dangle. That was the thanks Hines got from FDR, after all he done for him.
I was determined not to let that happen to me. One of the first things I did in Bubbles was buy the federal judge, and a good thing too because the feds didn’t even wait a decade to welsh on me. They tried to deport me as an undesirable alien in 1943, just because I was still carrying my British passport. Luckily my pet judge was on hand to naturalize me PDQ, and when the Washington goons came down, I told ’em to go piss up a rope. All it cost me was a cool quarter of a million. For added protection, I moved the police chief, Ermey, in next door, just over the hedgerow. I even had him appoint me a reserve police officer, “reposing special confidence in the worth, ability and integrity of Owen Madden.”
The neighborhood kids used to rumor that there was an underground tunnel between our houses, just in case a higher authority than the chief came calling. They also whispered that I was trainin’ my pigeons to carry secret messages all the way to New York, to my gangster buddies, or maybe to Hollywood and George Raft, the big movie star, to avoid the prying eyes and ears of the FBI agent who set up housekeeping right across the street and never got a goddamned thing on me. I never told ’em otherwise.
My strategy in Bubbles was to make friends with everybody, whether I needed to or not, because you never knew. I bought all the uniforms and trophies for the Hot Springs High School sports teams and marching bands, anonymously of course, because for some reason, though the town was proud enough of my residence there, nobody seemed to want my name on anything, which was fine with me. What wasn’t fine with me was when I bought a brand-new life-size statue of the BVM, complete with Lourdesian grotto, for St. Mary’s Catholic Church, the one across the street from Ouachita Hospital, which gratefully accepted my gift so long as my moniker wasn’t attached to it. A statue of Mary, in honor of…
My mother died in June of 1947. Marty, as usual, was the bearer of the bad news. He sent me a telegram, which arrived at the Hot Springs Western Union office at 11:39 A.M. Central Daylight Time, which was precisely sixteen minutes after he sent it from New York. “OWEN, MOTHER IS CRITICALLY ILL. BEST REGARDS TO YOU BOTH. MARTY.”
By which, of course, he meant that she was already dead.
After I had Frank Costello make sure there wasn’t going to be no trouble with the cops, Agnes and I drove up to New York for the funeral. It was at St. Mike’s too, just like May’s, and I shed a tear or two not only for Mary Agnes O’Neill Madden, the pride of the Burren, whose life was like her hope chest, which was to say empty, but for my sister, May, who never had a life, and for myself, who got the life I asked for, not to mention deserved.
That was my last official visit to a Catholic church, because Agnes was an adherent of the Christian Church, as they call it down here. I always thought I was a Christian, but she informed me I was just a Papist, which in Arkansas was a dirty word, like “nigger.” Sure, from time to time I was able to sneak into a Mass or two, but I was fugitive enough without having to be on the lam at the altar as well.
Roosevelt finally kicked the bucket in Warm Springs, Georgia. Tom Pendergast’s errand boy, Truman, more or less left me alone, although I almost had to face the Kefauver Committee, which convened in 1950 and ’51, right on schedule, a generation after Judge Seabury and his mob. I would have had to testify, except that Fortune smiled on me the year before, when Tennessee Estes came down to the Springs for a little rest and relaxation.
To you Kefauver was Mr. Crime Buster and Vice Presidential Candidate, but to me he was just another cheap Washington hoodlum out for a good time. He arrived with a juggy babe, and I hosted them at one of my clubs, out of town where nobody would see him, together with a couple of local officials. Wouldn’t you know it, as we were motoring back in my new Packard, the Doozies having gone under in ’37, one of the politicos suffered a shock or seizure of some kind, don’t ask me how it happened, so all of a sudden there was Mr. Crime Buster in a touring car with a blonde not his wife, my own good self—a gangster of some repute—and a fresh stiff.
“Don’t worry, Senator,” I told him. “I’ll take care of everything.” The stiff went to Ouachita Hospital, DOA, the blonde disappeared into a Kansas City whorehouse and the Senator trudged back to the Arlington Hotel with a plausible tale of an automotive breakdown. End of problem. End of my testimony. All my life, I never seen a hound like a Congressman, and that’s God’s honest truth.
The bum did drag poor Costello down to Washington, though. Frank refused to let the TV cameras show his phiz, and so all America saw of the Prime Minister of the Underworld was his hands, his shaking hands, and his dese-dem-and-dose voice, which more or less fixed the image of the goombah gangster in the public consciousness forever after.
As for Charlie Lucky, his luck finally ran out. Just as we’d said, Dewey trained his sights on the former Salvatore Lucania as soon as Dutch ate lead and forgot to digest it. The Special Prosecutor nailed Scarface Junior in ’36 on a hooker beef—“extortion and direction of harlotry,” you gotta love it, the revenge of the two-dollar hooker. Maybe even the revenge of Mary Frances Blackwell, although I didn’t like to think about it.
I got a kick out of the fact that where does Charlie run while under indictment but to Bubbles, my Bubbles, checking in to the Arlington under one of his pseudonyms with a fleet of gunners and broads and asks me—me—to bail him out. After all he done for me. I told him yes, which was more or less true and more or less a lie, because I had one of my flunkies ring up the Gov and order him to a meeting. The normal course of business in Arkansas was I would tell the state’s chief executive what to do and hand over a suitcase full of cash—never too much, fifty or sometimes a hundred grand, because we didn’t want these rubes to get the wrong idea about the value of dough—and then he would get back in the unmarked car driven by the unmarked State Trooper and do what I told him.
At this particular meeting, I gave the Gov fifty grand, which Charlie thinks is to buy protection, but which in reality is to buy the presence of the Arkansas National Guard, which shows up and takes him into custody, gee I’m so sorry, and packs him off to the slammer for thirty to fifty in Siberia. Eventually they shipped Lucky back to wopland and I guess he got delusions of George Raft glamour or something, because he was at the Napoli airport a couple of years ago, strolling out to shake the mitt of some Hollywood producer, when he up and drops dead of a heart attack, right there on the tarmac. See Naples and die.
I got a kick out of what Dewey said about Hot Springs. “The whole crowd are a complete ring: the Chief of Police, the Chief of Detectives, the Mayor and the City Attorney.” Well, sure, Tom—that’s how you do it right.
As for me, I got Bubbles and Garland County running pretty much the way I liked it. I bought up or opened as many gambling clubs as I could manage—the Vapors, the Tower, the Belvedere and my headquarters, the Southern Club and Grill, which was tucked in next to the Medical Arts Building, one of the tallest in town; it reminded me of good old 440 West 34th. You shoulda seen the looks on their faces as one hero after another waltzed in the front door, magic names, like Costello and Lansky. Them Hot Springs hillbillies ate that stuff up, let me tell you.
I held court in the Southern Club every day, one of my Jack Russells by my side. As one died, I’d replaced him or her with another: Sissy, Thomas, Ginger, Blackie, Tammy. I never went anywhere without a dog; Paramount Theaters even gave my little Sissy a lifetime movie pass. Monk had his kits and his boids; I had my Jacks and my pigeons.
With Costello looking after my investments in New York, and Hot Springs ticking over nicely under Leo McLaughlin, Meyer and I went into business with our friend Batista down in Cuba, casinos and so forth. Meyer would shuttle back and forth between Lanskyland in Florida and Havana, while I would send my brother, Marty, there to look after my end of things. Marty liked the work; it helped him buy that farm of his in Virginia, the one he shared with Kitty. Marty was all the family I had left now, what with Ma and May gone and my daughter, my baby Margaret, not such a baby anymore, never really here, at least for me. The daughter to whom I’ve left the grand sum of One Dollar and No/100 in my Last Will and Testament, “whose exact address and married name I do not know, but who did live in Yonkers, New York.”
Cuba turned out to be the thing that got Marty in dutch; no good deed goes unpunished, as they say. Back in December of 1930 I’d sent him over to Havana on business, and when he came back through Miami, he did what everybody else did, which was to say he was an American citizen, which he wasn’t So now here it is twenty-three years later and somebody in Washington says he entered the country illegally way back when and that, because of his priors, he was deportable on the grounds of moral turpitude. Unlike me, Social Security number 432–62–2509, Marty had never gotten around to fixing the citizenship thing, which meant that he didn’t have the proper visa or some such, and given his rap sheet—a pathetic arrest record, not a patch on mine—he was ordered to return to England, the land of our birth.
That made me mad. Just like you don’t choose your parents, you can’t choose your siblings. They just happen at random, blind fate, turn of the card, spin of the wheel, all life 9 to 5 against. And yet there they are, squalling into the world, so I guess you can say we all beat the odds, for a while.
Marty and Kitty were living down at Somerset Farm in Charlottesville, Virginia, named after the street we were born on in Leeds, horses and cattle, but that came to naught, like everything else Marty tried, especially with the deportation proceedings looming, and so they sold it off in 1954 for $77,000 and moved back to Manhattan, to 27 West 96th Street, a nice building where I kept a couple of flats for emergency purposes. I didn’t want to see my brother shipped out for Liverpool, the Madden family going in reverse, so I made a few phone calls and called in a few favors. What else were Senators good for?
The first bill to naturalize Marty, S. 3216, introduced on the Senate floor in March, crapped out, which meant my donation hadn’t been high enough. It made me damn mad that these bastards were shaking me down for more, but there was nothing I could do about it. So Agnes and I made a handsome contribution to McClellan’s reelection campaign, which was hand-delivered by one of my stooges in a nice tidy envelope to the Senator on July 10, 1954. “We decided this is more prudent than going to any Committee in HS as it seems every ‘2 bit’ politician and newspaper writer tries to make capital with everything connected with our name,” Agnes wrote in the note. I never put my name to anything I didn’t have to.
The second bill, S. 541, introduced on January 18, 1955, was more like it. “Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That for the purposes of the immigration and nationality Act, Martin Aloysius Madden shall be held and considered to have been lawfully admitted to the United States for permanent residence as of the date of the enactment of this Act, upon payment of the required visa fee.”
The bill was sponsored by Senator, former Governor, Herbert H. Lehman of New York, helped along by Senator McClellan, and was ratified by the full Senate on June 14. We listened hard to hear any objections from Dewey, but Albany was silent.
Things had come full circle: first the politicians owned the gangsters, then we owned them and then they became us. It was Tammany’s last laugh, disguised as reform: the Tiger at a masquerade ball, wearing a goo-goo mask but still the same hungry beast beneath.
I got a nice telegram from Marty the next day: “DEAR BROTHER TRIED TO CALL YOU ALL MORNING AND NO ANSWER THE SENATE VOTED IN MY FAVOR ON MY BILL YESTERDAY AND IT PASSED EVERYTHING LOOKS VERY GOOD LOVE MARTY.” Through the good offices of the Honorable W. F. Norrell of the Sixth District in Arkansas—he was from Monticello, Arkansas—it sailed through Francis E. Walter of Pennsylvania’s Judiciary Subcommittee No. 1 (Immigration) in mid-July and passed the House on July 30, 1955, which meant that Marty was home free.
The New York law firm I hired, Cotton, Brenner and Wrigley, of 225 Broadway, prepared a handsome brief in support of S. 541. Testimonials from everyone who’d known my brother since we were pups—priests, rabbis and vicars. Kitty Madden. Cops and robbers, Sixty-seven pages of encomia, ending with this from the mouthpieces, dated March 2, 1954: “In our letter of yesterday, we inadvertently omitted to mention that the nearest relative living in this country of Mr. Martin A. Madden is his brother Owen Madden, who resides in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Respectfully Yours, COTTON, BRENNER & WRIGLEY.”
You can’t make this stuff up. Last billed in my most important appearance in my brother’s life.
Marty died a few years later. Simons, where I was getting to be a regular, dressed him out and St. Mike’s sent him into the hereafter. May, Ma and now Martin—four blocks from where we landed we were already a vanishing race, down to me and my little girl, wherever she was.
It seemed everybody was leaving me, or trying to. A punk named Vinnie the Chin took a shot at Costello right in the lobby of his apartment building on Central Park West, but Vinnie was a lousy shot and only grazed him. Frank and I knew Genovese was behind it, but unfortunately the botched hit led to an inquiry into our ownership of the Tropicana, which meant Frank had to do a little time. Vito took over Frank’s business in his absence, which is to say my business, and that’s how the Genovese “crime family” was born, even if Costello and I did all the heavy lifting.
Movie fellas kept pesterin’ me about selling them the rights to my life story, as if they haven’t already stolen it from me a dozen times. Mugs who were sportin’ knee pants when I was running the rackets read the papers and get bright ideas: “Jutting brows over cold eyes, lean cheeks, aquiline nose, thick, tight lips, human TNT held in leash by an iron will—that’s Owney Madden, Hell’s Kitchen’s ‘Uncle Owney,’ ‘Owney the Killer,’ ‘Owney the Hermit’ of Sing Sing, in his prime the terror man of mystery, richest and most politically influential racketeer of his day…” Swill like that.
W.P. Hendry of MGM wrote to me in 1943 that neither Clinton Anderson, the chief of police in Beverly Hills, nor the L.A. district attorney, Fred Howzer, would have any objection if I wanted to come and live in Beverly Hills—“provided, of course, no former business be transacted.” I turned him down cold. Ten years later Metro came back to me in the person of one Art Cohn, who wanted to write a book about me. Gave him the air too. Jim Bishop had written me a month earlier, asking what my favorite prayer was. “It would be most helpful if it is a prayer of your own devising, your own words.”
I guess this book’s your answer, Jim.
And so I started to fade, like one of them old photographs. People that used to be so clear and so familiar that you didn’t even bother to write their names on the backs turn into nameless ghosts, spirits of the past, the only power they have left to haunt.
It’s funny how, at the end of your life, you finally start to think about the future, when it’s too late to do you any good. The brightest kids in town like to hang out at the Southern, sitting in the front room, looking for swells and watching for gangsters, soaking up whatever they can. I always had time for ’em, and a word of advice or two, and once in a while a double sawbuck.
After the war I let Mayor McLaughlin go and replaced him with a bunch of GIs fresh back from the war, running on a reform ticket. This being Hot Springs, there was no Republican Party to speak of, so it was a Democratic reform ticket, which meant there would be plenty of Democrats and precious little reform. A trio of lawyers, Sid McMath, Clyde Brown and Nathan Schoenfeld, put up a slate of candidates county-wide, which included my own personal lawyer down here, Q. Byrum Hurst. Sid was the former southwestern Golden Gloves champ, which made me like him straight off. He ran for prosecuting attorney. They all won.
Naturally there was a great deal of flapdoodle about this bein’ curtains for gambling in Hot Springs, etc., etc., but of course it wasn’t. This was my kind of reform. Somebody asked Orval Faubus, the governor, why the state didn’t shut down illegal gambling in Hot Springs and he said the state police were too busy directing traffic to interfere in local matters.
After eleven terms, Leo took it hard, but I wasn’t in the mood to fool around, and so when he started kicking, I got him indicted on bribery charges, a nice touch. He did some time but he kept his mouth shut. Earl Ricks, who owned a Buick dealership with Raymond Clinton, became the new Mayor. That was in 1947.
Raymie’s got a brother, Roger, who isn’t much good for anything when he’s drunk, which is often, but is a pretty good mechanic otherwise. He works on my cars. His wife, Virginia, a busty party-girl-turned-nurse, sometimes takes care of me whenever I need medical attention, so the Clintons have me coming and going. Virginia has a son I’ve taken a shine to, a bright kid named Billy who likes to hang out at the Southern Club with Byrum Hurst’s kid. Maybe he’ll learn something.
Later some zealous punk out to make a name for himself put Byrum on trial for income-tax-evasion shenanigans, but I testified that the income they claimed he was hiding was simply a loan from me, and no, I couldn’t remember whether he’d paid me back yet, but I was sure he would. I loan money to lots of people, and some of ’em pay me back and some of ’em don’t. Everybody knows that. He beat the rap.
One of the lawyers who handled his case wrote me a letter: “I am still enjoying the picture of you on the witness stand answering so well the questions I asked you relative to your background and your loans to Byrum, and I particularly remember the outstanding manner with which you handled yourself when cross-examined by the Government.” That’s me, still the master…
My friends down here gave me a testimonial dinner on St. Patrick’s Day in 1958. Eddie Rogers and his Arlington Hotel Orchestra played my favorite songs: “Machushla,” “Where the River Shannon Flows,” and of course the best, “Danny Boy.” I told them not to play “The Last Rose of Summer.”
The papers say I’m sitting on four million dollars. That got the tax men all riled up, naturally, and the past couple of years they’ve been coming after me pretty vicious. Ever since they nailed the Big Fella, the green-eyeshade gang is feeling its oats. They want to know how I can report an income of less than ten grand a year when the word is that the Southern Club alone is pulling in thirty grand a month, but that’s what the books show.
Cash is a different story. It’s everywhere. Agnes stuffs it down coffee cans, slips it between book covers, wraps it up with rubber bands and hides it in the toilet tanks. Not to mention she wears it. A yellow gold heart-shaped brooch set with one hundred diamonds and one pear-shaped blue sapphire. A platinum diamond bracelet set with two square diamonds, fifty-four baguette diamonds and 244 brilliant-cut diamonds. A platinum diamond bracelet set with three marquise diamonds, thirty-six baguette diamonds and 340 round diamonds. You get the picture.
After I’m gone, after she’s gone, nobody will ever find it. It’s all taken care of. They say you can’t take it with you, and maybe you can’t, but you sure as hell can fix it so no dirty sonofabitch can take it away from you either.
So that’s about it. I’m in this state now, this funny state that flashes me back to before I was even born, to where May wanted to go when she got to the other side, and where she is now, and where I’m going. Flashes me back to the Last Rose of Summer, which it’s taken me all these many years to figure out all along what was growing in my own flat, my own 352, my own 440, my own flesh and blood and if that’s a sin, then God damn me to Hell. You’d have done the same too.
I see my Da, lying on his back, not in the ring, but on the dock, fighting for breath, the breath You gave him and which You, the Boss, the Big Fella, the real capo di tutti capi, took away, for no reason, because You could.
I been in this damned Ouachita Hospital four days now, undershirt and pajama bottom my only inventory. Lying on my back, just like Da, just like I did so long ago at the Arbor, sucking in breaths with great difficulty, remembering, the pain intense, the clock ticking, and it must amuse You something fierce, something diabolical, only this time it’s not a bull leaning over me, asking me Owney who done this thing, but a nurse or two, maybe a doctor, and they’re all wearin’ white, like the angels in heaven, or maybe all the saints.
The answer’s still the same: I done it to myself.
They’re leaning over me with that look on their face, that look I’ve seen once or twice, the look that says he ain’t gonna make it, what a tough break, and do you have any last words?
I’m alone, which is the way we all go out. I can hear the voices, speaking through the solitude—the great Jack Johnson, who on the canvas in Havana embraced it; the great Dutch Schultz, on the deck in Newark, calling for the bill and begging for it.
I’m having trouble breathing. Emphysema, the doctors have been telling me. Cigarettes. Bullshite. Them bullets in me are acting up, and the ones that are gone are acting up worse. Each one with Little Patsy’s name on it, every one reminding me of Leeds and Wigan and Liverpool and the time Fats cut the strings of my mother’s purse. The time when I got my payback, when I conked him with the lead pipe; the time when he got my own wife, my Loretta, to lure me to the Arbor, so’s he could take a shot at me. The time when I lured him with dear sweet Freda into Nash’s, so’s I could finish him off. And who would have thought that all these memories—especially now—could come flooding back to me, like the pigeon’s blood, like Luigi’s and Willie’s and Vannie’s blood, like Dutch’s fedora, wobbling on that table, trying to decide which way to fall and coming right down in the middle, fifty-fifty, the jury still out.
I hope you’re proud of me, Da. I wasn’t a fighter like you, but I was a fighter just the same.
Not alone. Agnes is here, and Loretta, and I think that’s Freda and Margaret Everdeane standing behind her, alongside my Mother, who’s holding hands with Mary Frances. All the women of my life, the Marys and the Margarets and the Magdalenes, come to comfort me in my hour of need. To shepherd me.
All but one.
Dutch figured it out, delirious Dutch on his deathbed, with Monk’s last slug in him, mother is always the best bet, Hoboe and Poboe I think mean the same thing, and you know what, Dutch, you almost got it right. If there’s one thing we know, it’s how to settle a tab and settle a score, no matter how long it takes.
We are Irishmen and we are a type and I know who is best.
A boy has ever wept. Tears and blood are the same thing.
My suit is pressed and ready, and my hat, the fedora I haven’t worn since that day in 1935, and best of all my .38, Monk’s .38, loaded again, a miracle, may all the saints be praised.
She’s here, her face whole again, not a hair of her head out of place, radiant, smiling, happy…her hand extended.
I reach and rise.
The city, the river, the sky. Me, up high, duke of all I survey. Her hand in mine, looking out over our empire, and her head still intact, with her pretty face still shining and me with my guts and my spirit still in me, just the two of us holding hands, innocent as always, like when we were kids, looking out over all the world and knowing it was ours, and just waiting for the day when it would be, never to be separated again. Two holy ghosts starting over, standing over 352, looking out, running now, into the darkness, rushing for the edge of the building—
We jump.
Not a dare or a dream but reality. Over the roofs of old New York, with the horses and the pushcarts and the dirt from the Seventh Avenue subway spritzing everywhere, and the iceman and the coalman and the ragman and the boneman singing their songs, but we don’t care because we’re up above them now, beyond them, way up in the air, watching the Waldorf fall and the Empire State rise, watching the els tumble and the motorcars flock, sailing out over the Harbor, over the Bay, over the wide Ocean, over everything, until at last we can see, way off in the distance, the hills our Mother told us about, the grey limestone of the Slieve Elva and the green Bens and far off, the Mountains of Mourne, the Mountains of Home.
So please don’t mourn for us, May and me, who didn’t know no better, who didn’t have a chance to know no better, for all of those who have gone before us in sin and sorrow, heathen or Christian, Jew or Gentile, the blessed and the damned, past and future to come, for we are all equal now and we don’t need your sympathy, just your understanding.
May, we’re flying. Just you and me and all the saints, forever and ever.
It doesn’t hurt anymore.
So hold my hand.
And soar.