“He ate at some of the great dinner tables of the country, but he hated legitimate people and loved thieves.”
That is how Jimmy Breslin would describe Damon Runyon early in his book on that writer. It was clear he also was writing about himself.
“I am here,” he wrote in his 1991 book Damon Runyon, explaining what he was doing standing at the file drawers in Austin, Texas, “because more than anybody else I’ve ever heard of, he beat the New York newspaper business. Beat it to a pulp. And his life gave off a reflection of more than three decades of the city of New York, and it has almost become the official record of the times.”
Writing that resembled his became known as Runyonesque. Breslin, by those who saw easy similarities and not the distinctions, was known as the Damon Runyon of Queens Boulevard.
That is wrong. What they had in common was that both men beat the newspaper business to a pulp. And Breslin chronicled more than five decades of the city of New York. What set them apart was the cadence of their prose, the intent of the writing, and the world as seen through their characters’ eyes. Breslin was unique.
Breslin was the Bard of Queens Boulevard.
His characters were not Runyonesque. They were Breslinesque.
“I grew up being afraid of my feelings and suddenly my brain finds a way to make them my main strength,” Breslin wrote in his book I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me.
“I replaced my feelings with what I felt were the feelings of others, and that changed with each thing I went to, so I was about sixty-seven different people in my life.”
One of those people was Marvin the Torch. Others included Klein the Lawyer; Un Occhio, the Mob boss; and Fat Thomas. Their mischief and misfortune was real: too many wives, arson gone wrong, too many bad bets among them. They may have been spun around the armatures of real people but it was this thing that Breslin has noted resided in his brain—his mind—that brought each of them to life. Allowed them to tell the truth. Allowed the reader to feel not represented by a newspaper but represented in a newspaper, and not simply in the grotesquerie of dark inked headlines. They inhabited him. He inhabited them. He did this not only with his characters, but with the many whose identities were not cloaked in hyperrealism. Breslin’s paper’s ink might rub off on your fingers, but the people came alive in your face.
To capture those feelings through the eyes of his characters as their lives evolved and do it in the City Column format that Breslin wrote in—around 1,000 words—and in the vehicle in which those words appeared—daily newspapers printed on cheap newsprint and tossed away after one day’s discussion or bent elbow argument—required clarity in characterization and vividness. Sometimes with his characters, especially Fat Thomas, Breslin could define the arc of a life across intervals that were sometimes spaced weeks and months apart. Like a poet singing as he walks across Greece, Breslin lets the story unfold, and reshapes it along the way.
This is not a cheap journalism trick. This is in the tradition of oral history as now told by an itinerant poet of newsprint. It was also the way Breslin’s character columns were retold by readers across the city. “Hey, did you read Breslin today?” And in a sense, that too is part of the genre, the City Column, as Jimmy Breslin reinvented it. AJB (after Jimmy Breslin), it becomes adopted by other newspaper and sports columnists in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, elsewhere; this becomes the way a story is told with a narrator who was often present as a character himself. It draws, as Breslin notes, from great columnists and writers BJB (before Jimmy Breslin), but it is an authentic, new voice, and new style.
“Sing to me, oh Muse, of Marvin the Torch, setting fire on those distant shores . . . of the twists and turns of Fat Thomas and the many griefs he suffered . . .”
Breslin’s mock heroic characters first stood not on some Attic shore, but on the cracked sidewalks of his early childhood home.
In this way Breslin’s characters aren’t romantic characters, though there is a certain romance in reading about them. Breslin learned from Runyon, but he wrote for a post-Runyonesque world. And when he wrote about Runyon, who was certifiably his idol, he was in fact writing about himself. He studied Runyon and the foundation he had laid, then went beyond him without taking a single thing away from him.
“While there are still plenty of thugs around who seem lovable at first, it all winds up with them selling drugs to kids. . . . the money all comes from selling crack to thirteen year-olds, and I don’t know how to make that bright and funny.”
And he didn’t try. He drew his often wry humor, and the joy and often hopeful attitude that many of his characters contained, from an understanding of the Athens of a nation’s low-rise urban world: Queens. He didn’t paint them in the bright lights of Manhattan’s Great White Way—Broadway. Breslin painted his people in the neighborhoods—the towns—of Queens and in its criminal courts, and its bars and its restaurants and the grand offices of the borough president that lined the 7.2 miles of Queens Boulevard. His characters and the stories drawn from their lives often served as a respite for the reader from the crime and violence by haters, drug lords, Caucasians stuck in the past, ugly mobsters and from civil unrest, war and cheap politicians who stole dimes from parking meters; the stuff, in other words, that filled the front pages of newspapers.
For all their mishaps, Breslin’s people often had a charitable view of the world. They put human in the human condition. Breslin used them to provide clarity even as they provided relief from the kinds of things he often had to write about in his column. And when he wrote in his compelling way about those crises and tragedies for too many days and weeks in a row, he, in his pain—or his editors, in their occasional wisdom—called for a story from Klein or Fats or Marvin or Mutchie, who was a bartender.
This was Breslin’s World Without End, where the longest voyage was 32.39 miles on the A train from 207th Street in the Inwood section of Manhattan to Land’s End in Far Rockaway, Queens. His Queens was home to around 1.5 million people who lived in everything from houses on stilts in a tidal Appalachia in Jamaica Bay called Broad Channel to the vertical slums of dangerous housing projects. It was a reporter’s delight: the clubhouse politics of a corrupt democratic party, a police force in residence most of whose members came from out of town, a couple of airports with plenty of cargo to choose from, and the Mafia and Irish mobsters. The rest of the country, for Klein the Lawyer, Marvin the Torch, Mutchie and largely even Fat Thomas, who occasionally accompanied Breslin abroad—to Washington, D.C., or the South—was terra incognita.
Of course, from the start, except for the enlightened, no one in New York’s chattering classes or the Washington Beltway punditorium believed these robust characters existed.
Foremost among these was Rosenthal of The Times.
Abe Rosenthal was considered a vulture by some of the writers in residence at Bleeck’s according to published accounts. And according to his obituaries he was a tyrant, monomaniacal and given to fits.
But this bow tie-wearing little man also gets credit for turning the Gray Lady’s gray columns into something a little less gray and with a larger world view. The paper even in the 1960s had the resources and the stated intent to cover all that was important. By the time Rosenthal rose to run it, the paper had all the young talent at hand to straddle technological change. Of course Rosenthal, who presided over great events and great change, was described by some as perhaps the greatest editor that paper had seen. But that accolade tended to be given by some of those who worked for him. Breslin did not like him at all.
“We are almost mortal enemies,” Breslin wrote in his introspective book on his brain. “At one time he was editor of The Times newspaper and I wrote columns for a paper called the Herald Tribune about life in a large saloon on Queens Blvd . . . But since it was in Queens, nobody knew anything about it. Every time I mentioned it, people thought it wasn’t true. Mostly this was because of insane jealousy. Rosenthal announced that I was making everything up. He showed up one night.”
The night Rosenthal showed up in one of Breslin’s Queens’ haunts, Jimmy Burke, who later would become famous for holding up the Lufthansa Freight Terminal for close to $9 million, was there.
Fat Thomas was roaring at the bar. He was six-three and weighed 415 pounds. . . . He had 51 arrests for bookmaking. . . . Now Fat Thomas was real, alive and barging around Pep McGuire’s . . . Seeing this, Rosenthal said, “It’s all true!” He wound up with so much whiskey in him that he threw himself at a huge blonde Lufthansa stewardess. He buried his head in her chest.
“Abe, she wants to throw you in an oven,” Fat Thomas said.
“I know, I can’t help it,” Rosenthal said.
Free of Rosenthal, Breslin and Fat Thomas could get on with The New Journalism, which included telling stories, true stories, based on real people.
Rosenthal himself later went on to write a column.
One time, Breslin read it and thought it an embarrassment. So he called Rosenthal’s paper and left a message asking how he could have ever stood at a bar with Breslin and “pretended to be an equal.”
Breslin had at this time in his life an almost Falstaffian persona, combining wisdom with humor and beer. He also had an ability to turn a slight into an unforgivable injury. But in the case of Rosenthal, the day some 25 years later when Breslin saw Rosenthal in a wheelchair after triple bypass surgery as he himself was being released from convalescence after brain surgery—that day he felt warmly toward Rosenthal, he said.
“The guy once caused newsrooms to quiver and presidents to wonder how they could fend off his anger and appeal to his vanity and humor. Now he was waving good-bye from a wheelchair. If he couldn’t do the wave, people would be waving goodbye to him. I had a warm feeling about him. If illness was the reason for this, then it was wrong. I should have liked the guy all along on his brains alone.”
In the arc of Breslin’s amusement, bemusement, anger and forgiveness of Rosenthal we are seeing Breslin polishing his greatest character of all: himself. For a good Catholic like Breslin, a near death experience was certainly a very good time to forgive, having yourself just asked for the same.
No less than Klein, with his wives and payments; Fat Thomas with his bad bets and bad debts; Marvin The Torch, who finally found a woman to marry him (he knew she was the one when she accepted that the placard with numbers he held across his chest in a couple of his pictures was actually a license plate); there was Breslin himself. Breslin with his neighbors, noise, and children, always with no money or the threat of no money or a creditor on the phone. Breslin was his own greatest character, by turns dark or light, a many-faceted character who was inhabited by James Earle Breslin, the abandoned boy, and whose heart never turned away from the goal of turning the inarticulate into the understandable.
So when Fats mocked Rosenthal, there was Breslin: dark haired, impish smile, sparkling eyes, chubby, with a glass of the golden nectar in his hand doing what a great journalist or a truly smart criminal does best: he was stealing with his eyes, stealing with both hands. Happy in his kingdom, the abandoned boy now was both jester and prince, boon companion and shrewd observer. It was “Beautiful,” as he liked to say, and he was at this moment “J.B. Number One.”
Sometimes, in his pettiness, there was no crime too small:
THE SIGN IN THE YARD
The wife of a new neighbor from up on the corner came down and walked up to my wife and started acting nice, which must have exhausted her.
This woman is one of the people I have to live with. Four years ago, in the true style of an amateur, I “moved out a bit.” I moved onto a block with a lot of other people who live side by side in houses. Now, people are all right. Get them alone and they’re pretty good. But put five of them together and they start conforming and after that all they are is trouble. Put 16 families on the same block, the way it is on mine, and they are not people any more. They are enemies. . . . .
“I haven’t gotten a chance to see you since the baby,” the new one said. “How nice. This is, uh, your. . . ?”
She knew the number, she knows everything. She knew my take-home pay by the end of the first week she was on the block.
“Fifth,” my wife said.
“How wonderful,” she said. “And did you plan this one?”
“Oh, yes,” my wife said sweetly, “why, everybody I know plans their fifth baby.”
THE WOMAN got mad and walked away. Which was great. I was going to say something to her that she could tell her husband for me, but I didn’t have the time. I had to stay on Walter, from the Dazzle Sign Painting Co., who was on my lawn and acting like a coward.
“Put it up, Walter,” I told him.
“Not in the daylight,” Walter said.
“An argument is an argument, but if you do this it lets everybody know that you’re crazy,” my wife says. My wife ran inside the house. She is the former Rosemary Dattolico and she is very Italian. She likes knives on black nights, not big posters in broad daylight.
“Let’s go, Walter,” I said, and Walter, from the Dazzle Sign Painting Co., put in both the stakes and tacked the sign on and when he was finished, right there on the lawn was the most beautiful sign you ever saw.
IT WAS ABOUT three feet high and five feet wide and it was in three bright colors and it read real good. On the top, in two lines of big red upper case letters, the sign said:
SORRY TO MAKE YOU LOOK AT THIS BECAUSE I KNOW HOW TIRED YOU PEOPLE GET MOVING YOUR LIPS WHEN YOU READ.
Underneath this, in smaller, but still real big blue letters, was a line which said, “PEOPLE I’M NOT TALKING TO THIS YEAR.”
The line was centered. Right under it, in neat columns, like a service honor roll, was the name of everybody who lives on my block.
Good on you, James Earle Breslin, you’re a good man.
In reality, you had to get this close and squint to see the words on the actual sign that was put up but that factually accurate description would lose the truth, and the humor that could only be found in Breslin’s imagined in-your-face retort to his neighbors.
Who doesn’t from time to time hate their neighbors? Who wouldn’t enjoy imagining putting up a sign like that? Breslin made that sign for you.
While Breslin’s truth, like his characters, came off the streets of his childhood, his prose came out of good grammar, careful choices, and common sense in putting together each column. It came out of the bars and of his years scratching out words and counting them as if they were money. They came out of a personality that was fundamentally that of a criminal because James Earle Breslin, “J.B. Number One,” was the ultimate reporter—a traitor who would betray a friend for a thousand words. When Breslin wrote this column, it was October 1964. It was a year in which many of his characters were very busy. So was James Breslin. And what made these particular columns such a joy, if not to write, but to put in the newspaper, was their context. America was wrestling with ignorance and ugliness. Race. Poverty. Poor Education. Crimes as big as these. There was strife. Violence. And far away but coming soon: a war in the heat of a country whose name would soon become well known: Vietnam.
“Nobody ever had a sign like this,” Walter said. “Nobody. I paint ‘Fire Sale’ and ‘Prices Slashed’ and for gin mills I do ‘Under New Management’ or ‘Sunday Cocktail Hour’ but I never in my life done a sign like this.”
“Beautiful,” I said. I stood back and admired it.
FOR A YEAR NOW, my wife has been hissing at the neighbors, “He’s writing a novel about the block and you’re in it because he hid a tape recorder under your kitchen table.” But this sign of mine beat any book . . .
“I think you’re sick,” Walter said.
“No, I’m not, I just hate those people.”
Everyday life. One of the things that was also essential to write about.
Who doesn’t from time to time hate their neighbors? “Beautiful.”