Hot Springs, Arkansas April 1965
Lately I’ve been thinking about the Mad Mick and how he died bloody in the London call box on 23rd Street, and about Little Patsy and his gunsels, Granny and his damsels, and Texas and her brassy lungs, and about how we shot the Dutchman in the Palace john in Jersey along with his dear boy Lulu.
The Cotton Club has crossed my mind more than once, which was after it was Jack’s Club Deluxe, although if you ask me, it was never the same after they moved it from darktown to midtown and Hymie Arluck went Hollywood and turned into the Wizard of Oz. So has the Duke, for that matter, although nobody ever called him that when I was around, because I was always the real Duke, if you ask anybody who knows. Like Walter and Damon and Jimmy Hines and Joe the Boss and Arnold and Lucky and Meyer, and Estes the Senator from Tennessee and John the Senator from Arkansas, and Joe’s kids Jack and Bobby and all the rest of them who made my life so remunerative and difficult more or less at the same time. Not to mention the Kitchen gang, One Lung, Razor, Happy Jack, Art and Hoppo, but also Legs, Lucky and the Bug, the Big Fella and the Little Man.
Gone now, most of them long gone, except for old friends like Mae and Georgie, big stars now, four-letter household words. And here I sit in Bubbles, alone with Agnes and my pigeons, gazing out on North Mountain and West Mountain and the rest of the Ouachitas, which remind me of Ireland, at least the Ireland my mother used to tell me about, which was probably mostly a lie. Whereas they’ve all been plugged, fried, planted and otherwise disposed of.
When I think about them other mugs, I suppose I got off lucky, luckier than Luciano, although I never went for a ride like him, although he never got it from the Hudson Dusters like I did. Lucky ran dames, I ran after ’em, which may be the basic difference between us, when you come to think of it. And right now, who would you rather be? Me, sitting here pretty if semiventilated in Hot Springs, or Salvatore Luciano, dead on the tarmac in wopland, his nasty heart bursted wide open and his last view the phiz of a Hollywood producer, there to seek his life story? Me, I never did much worry about immortality.
Except now, when mortality’s as close as a barber’s blade. If you ask me, you could learn a thing or two about life from yours truly, if learning there is to be had from the ruminations of an old English Irishman, if you call 73 old, which I guess you have to, especially in my profession.
As far as this truthfulness stuff goes, though, I have to tell you that in my opinion truthfulness is vastly overrated, especially in a court of law, where lying is always much more efficacious, not to mention safer, not to mention profitable. Besides, lying’s something I’ve known since I was a kid, something I’ve tried to teach all my boys, on account of in our business that’s what you do if you want to stay in business. When somebody tells me how that’s different from what other businessmen do, then maybe I’ll stop. But first I’ll laugh in his face and tote up my swag one last time.
They say that every man is a hero to his dog, of which I’ve had plenty and each one of ’em a Jack Russell, but no man is a hero to his valet, of which I’ve had only one, because you can replace a mutt but not a man. I guess if I have a purpose these days, it’s to get people to remember us, our gang and our girls, recollection right and proper, givin’ the divvil his due as it were, which is why I’m summoning memories and conjuring the dead. Because when everything else has departed, slipped aside, fallen away or been blown asunder, what do we have left except remembrance? Old and fading, mayhaps, but alive and whole and full of life’s coursing blood as long as we are.
There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about them all, and what we did and how we did it and sometimes even why. Most of all I think about them that died and those what lived, whether any of them deserved it or not, and wonder how it all turned out the way it did and why I’m still here, with five bullets in my gut and six gone but God it hurts, still hurts, fifty years on and more.
And most of all, in this month of April I think of May.