Niagara Falls the First Time
Penny saw us off at Penn Station — we were headed for Buffalo, then Canada, the first time I’d ever leave the States. She stood on the platform and waved at all the passing windows, just in case someone she knew was on the other side, waving back.
“Nice girl,” I said to Rocky, hoping for some information. He shrugged, and shouldered his suitcase onto the luggage rack.
“Very nice girl,” I said again.
He nodded absentmindedly. “Listen,” he said suddenly. “I want to stop and see Niagara Falls. We’ll go?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Water running downhill,” I said. If he was bored by Penny, I was bored by some dog-legged river. “What’s the big to-do?”
“You’ll see. Don’t play jaded, kid. It doesn’t become you.”
He was right. Good God: I’d only known the Falls as part of that old bit. In real life the river poured and poured and poured, rainbows woven in at the bottom, the giant plume of mist floating up, water giving into gravity and then finding a loophole. I could see how the mere memory could drive someone insane. I felt unstable myself.
“Rocky,” I said in wonder. “Why don’t they take a breath?”
“They don’t have waterfalls in Iowa?” he asked casually.
I didn’t know the answer to that. Anyhow, it sure wasn’t Duluth.
There was a guy there who engraved drinking glasses with names. He used a pneumatic drill tipped with a diamond, and the glass chips rained down, beautiful as the diamond, beautiful as the finished glass, beautiful as the Falls themselves. I thought about getting one, but didn’t know whose name to put down. In my father’s house, there were seven ruby glass cups, souvenirs of some fair from some cousin, one for each of us living kids, our names and birth dates written on the side. By now my sisters had plenty of children whose names might be engraved in glass by a fond uncle; Annie, my dogged correspondent, had cataloged them for me. I fingered a bill in my pocket.
“C’mon,” said Rocky. “Let’s go.”
Souvenirs everywhere, mostly for the fabled visiting newlyweds and their spendthrift sentiment. I examined reverse-glass painted brooches, change purses made of tiny seashells, etched aluminum cups. We stood on the Canadian side of the border and Rocky read aloud from a pamphlet about all the people who’d ever gone over the Falls in a barrel. Not all of the barrels were barrels: one guy rode over in a giant rubber ball, another in a tin ship that crumpled like foil on the river below.
“Here’s someone,” said Rocky. “‘His capsule bounced behind the great curtain of the Falls, out of the reach of rescuers. Despite all efforts to save him, Stathakis suffocated behind the rush of water.’ ”
“Well, then he lived longer than he deserved to.”
“You wouldn’t go over?” Rocky asked. “You’d be a hero if you lived.”
I turned to him. The wind had pulled his hair into chunks. He looked at the Falls as though they were a particularly worthy adversary, and I decided not to tell him that in June of 1927 I’d lost my stomach for acts of pointless, gravity-tempting bravery. That man who starved had had a family, and they’d never forgiven him for what he’d done.
“We’re booked for weeks,” I said. “Please don’t go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.”
“Well, if that’s how you feel, I won’t. Otherwise I’d go. Coverage in all the papers whether you make it or not. Rubber. Big rubber enclosed ball. It’ll bounce, it’ll float, it’ll be watertight. Made of old girdles, maybe: nothing can get through a girdle. And can you imagine the view?”
“Yes,” I said. “I can imagine it right here where I’m standing, thanks.”
For his sake I tried to see it: the tiny enclosed ship, a single window for its single passenger. Furtively, you bring it to the top floor of the Falls. You look around for the authorities, set it in the water, and anchor it to shore. You get in. Any minute you’ll be facing your death, but right now, even though the current is knocking you around, you can think: any leaks? No. Breathe in. Pull the anchor from the shore. Shoot forward.
Stare out the window to the spot where the bottom drops out of the river. What’s that: fear? Exhilaration? Belief that God has time to save idiots like you, when everywhere people die through no fault of their own? No, He’d wash His hands of you, here was the sink He’d do it in.
What you think, just before you plummet: You know, I’m sure the view is actually much better from dry land.
Back to New York to play the boroughs. In my spare time, I picked up girls. If I ran into a girl I’d slept with, it was like I had to bed her again, to make sure she still thought I was a nice guy. The ones who’d changed their minds made me crazy, though almost none of them did. Two or three, maybe, and they’d married, and even then that didn’t seem like a good excuse. I tried flowers, songs, whatever might work. One recently wed former paramour said, “Why me? There are plenty of girls,” and I scratched my head and said, “You know? You’re right,” and let go of her hand and fairly skipped off.
That worked.
I’d always been taught that love went something like this: There is a girl out there for you, and you find her, and then you work endlessly to keep love around. “Your parents loved each other, Mose,” my father told me more than once, “better love because harder work.” And so I came to understand: love is an animal that can — with a great deal of patience — be taught to sleep in the house. That doesn’t mean it won’t kill you if you’re not careful.
Really, do you want it in your house?
Maybe I liked some of those girls better than others. A girl named Gwen, maybe, and an Italian girl named Carlotta. Maybe sometimes I was glad to get away, and other times not, but mostly I remember being full of love while lying down with every girl, and then less so when I stood up to leave, as though my brain was a bowl tilted to collect a stingy serving of something that, when I was upright, drained to my feet, where it did no good.
But before then I felt swell, I felt fine, I felt perfectly cheerful. The cure for unhappiness is happiness, I don’t care what anyone says. The guys in vaudeville, they took all sorts of cures, you only had to watch what they ran to first thing in the morning to ease the last bits of their night terrors: a bottle, a needle, a bookie, a Western Union office, a stage, a wife, a child, a giant meal, a strange pretty girl. Would we be ashamed later? Sure. These days, when shamefulness and shamelessness are both sins, I don’t know how people operate. Back then, only shamelessness was: we were ashamed, and so we buried ourselves in the thing that shamed us, because it was the only thing that might make us feel better. And then we repented. And then, flush with repentance, we sinned again.
Tansy’s Discovery
Carter and Sharp were weary. Vaudeville wheezed all around us, milking its deathbed scene worse than, well, a vaudevillian. By 1937 we played as many nightclubs as vaude houses. Summers we worked in the Catskills or out near the Minnesota lakes. It got so Rocky wouldn’t go to a movie or listen to the radio. He couldn’t stand all those guys with less talent than us who nevertheless got big breaks.
And then we met Buddy Tansy.
We were in New York again, playing a run-down theater in the Bronx that had quit booking vaude acts in the early thirties in favor of movies, and was now adding a few performers to warm up the audience before the pictures. I think we opened for The Good Earth. The dressing rooms were in the basement and smelled like one hundred years of trained-dog acts. When we walked into ours after the show, there was a tiny man sitting on the old daybed, reading a newspaper. He squinted at us when we came in.