The bartender glances at his fob watch. “Naw, just three hours now, old-timer, and it’ll be all over.”
“Wha—?!” Now he’s sure they’re finishing him off. Sonuvabitch, just when he was striking a real seam at last! He throws down the drink, stuffs the paper cup in his pocket, and decides to work his way out in the general direction of his digs, so he can at least die in his own bed like a proper gent. If he can get through — whew! his pockets are so heavy he can barely move, and he wonders confusedly if he’s being treated to some unpleasant moral on the accumulation of capital. This is the worst he’s ever seen it!
It’s true, they’re really piling in now, everybody jamming up together, old and young, great and small, of all creeds, colors, and sexes, shoulder to shoulder and butt to butt, missionaries squeezed up with mafiosos, hepcats with hottentots, pollyannas with press agents and plumbers and panty raiders — it’s an ingathering of monumental proportions, which only the miracle of Times Square could contain! And more arriving every minute: workers in dungarees, millionaires in tuxedos, pilots, ballplayers, sailors, and bellboys in uniform, brokers in bowlers, bakers in white aprons tied over bare bellies. Certainly this is the place to be, and anyone who’s anyone is here: all the top box-office draws and Oscar winners, all the Most Valuable Players, national champions and record holders, Heisman Trophy and Pulitzer Prize winners, blue ribbon and gold medal takers, Purple Hearts and Silver Stars, Imperial High Wizards, Hit Paraders, Hall of Famers, Homecoming Queens, and Honor Listees. The winners of small-town centennial beard-growing contests have all come, the year’s commencement speakers, class valedictorians, and quiz-show winners, the entire Social Register, the secretariat of Rotary International. The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi. Yehudi Menuhin, Punjab, Dick Button, who isn’t here? Gary Cooper hoves into view up in the Claridge, wagging his shiny new Oscar from High Noon and doing his much-loved toe-stubbing aw-shucks Montana grin for all his admirers, both on the House Un-American Activities Committee and off — he’s been one of the top ten box-office draws for thirteen years running now — only Bing Crosby has been loved so long so well. Uncle Sam has provided Coop a special position tonight in a third-floor window of the Claridge where he can both see and be seen, along with other Hollywood stars friendly these past years to HUAC’s efforts to shrive and scour Movieland — good Americanists like Jack Warner, Elia Kazan, Bob Taylor, Ronnie Reagan and Larry Parks, Budd Schulberg, Ginger Rogers, George Murphy, Adolphe Menjou. Others, more suspect, like Bogie and Bacall, Lionel Stander, Zero Mostel, and Edward G. Robinson (his true identity, after all, is Emanuel Goldenberg of Bucharest!), are shunted off to the periphery, where they’ll be lucky, standing on tiptoes, to see a few distant sparks fly.
Harry James arrives, snaking his band through the thickening mob toward the Hotel Astor, where they’ve got a gig up on the Roof — their rendition of “Ciribiribin” will be featured tonight during the execution of Ethel Rosenberg. Paulette Goddard’s in the crowd, José Iturbi and Consuelo Vanderbilt, John L. Lewis and George Mikan. Esther Williams turns up in her tanksuit, hand-in-hand with the Oscar-winning cat-and-mouse team, Tom and Jerry — and old Mickey Mouse himself is there, too, celebrating his twenty-fifth birthday and elbowing his way through the crowd with Minnie, Goofy, Horace, and the rest of the aging Rat Pack. It’s also Eastern Airlines’ twenty-fifth birthday tonight, and Captain Eddie Rickenbacker has brought four thousand of his employees to the Square to celebrate it. The deejay, from his prominence, catches a glimpse of the famous bald pate of John Reginald Halliday Christie, the polite bespectacled necrophile, brought over here from London to model for wax museums before his hanging (the Mother Country is still catching on to electricity) next month, and in his honor plays Hank Williams’s “Lovesick Blues” and “I Can’t Help It.” It is said that Christie — who murdered at least seven women, including his wife Ethel, and copulated with their corpses, sent an innocent man to the gallows and earned two commendations as a member of the Police War Reserve for “efficient detection in crime”—was wounded in World War I, just like tonight’s Official Executioner Joseph Francel, by mustard gas. Patterns everywhere. Little Reggie, led through the Square by a brace of English bobbies, gazes gently at all the women, leaving a wake of frothy excitement. Some women are frightened, some smile, some faint, some come to orgasm. It’s supposed that Dr. Alfred Kinsey, invited here tonight to pursue his celebrated studies into the effects of electrocution upon the erogenous zones, cannot be far behind.
In such a pack-up there’s a natural rush on anything cold and wet. Some of the bars near the center are running out of liquor — the bottle brigades are drying up before they get all the way in, so heavy is the demand further out — and there’s talk of getting Eddie Rickenbacker to fly supplies in. Ice cream vendors are being mobbed, and nobody cares any more whether it’s Cherry-Oonilla or not. Fights break out, ice cream is shoved in faces, bottles shatter, people jab each other with their I LIKE KIKES buttons. Marquees read WE ARE SWINGING ROUND THE CIRCLE and THE FIERY TRIAL THROUGH WHICH WE PASS WILL LIGHT US DOWN IN HONOR OR DISHONOR TO THE LAST GENERATION, while around the Times Tower in electric lights circle the oracles of the American Prophet Gil Imlay…
EVERYTHING HERE GIVES DELIGHT * * * SOFT ZEPHYRS GENTLY BREATHE ON SWEETS AND THE INHALED AIR GIVES A VOLUPTUOUS GLOW OF HEALTH AND VIGOR THAT SEEM TO RAVISH THE INTOXICATED SENSES * * * FAR FROM BEING DISGUSTED WITH MAN FOR HIS TURPITUDE OR DEPRAVITY, WE FEEL THAT DIGNITY WHICH NATURE BESTOWED UPON US AT THE TIME OF CREATION * * *
Backstage, Uncle Sam, fresh arrived from his containment exercises out in the receding world, is watching all this ravishment and dignity through a peephole cut in the set for the purpose, the profane muscles of his face in tune for laughter and a merry twinkle in his steel-blue eyes. “Great balls of fire!” he whoops. “This may be the biggest thing since we struck oil at Titusville!” With him are some of the night’s key performers, due to go onstage any moment for the early part of the show, as well as a few of the heavyweights up from the VIP subway shelter for a sneak peek at the congregation. Which in its glow and vigor is getting a bit unruly. They seem to have been invaded by a certain anxiety out there, a certain exultation now that the sun has slipped behind the skyscrapers, a giddy sense of being at the edge of something terrific — like a striptease or the end of gravity or an invasion from Mars. There are whoops and screams and loud laughter. People are pressing into the sideshows not so much to see as to join them. Teetotalers elbow frantically toward the bars, shy clerks pinch bottoms and make naughty remarks, tourists forget their cameras, businessmen toss off their jackets, empty their pockets. The police are still managing to keep a semblance of order, but they can’t help being a little excited themselves — no matter which way they turn, or how quickly they whirl about, there’s always somebody behind them they can’t see, goosing them with electric shockers.
The Secretary of Agriculture, up for a glimpse of the festivities, objects piously to all this sensuality. “Pshaw! We need it, Ez — sex’ll cause the flame to grow,” retorts Uncle Sam. “You gotta plow up a field before you can grow something in it — what in tarnation did you think agriculture was all about, my friend?”