“Behind the dingy walls inside cramped rooms,” his Man of Destiny is declaiming now, “and airless, ah, there are thousands of homes let me say in which parental love and care burn as brightly as, as intensely…” He spies his wife’s personal secretary, presses an Eisenhopper down on her desk, pokes his finger in his ear as though absently cleaning it. “As in the homes of, uh, Abilene…” She pretends to be startled when it pops up and Eisenhower roars with delight. Mamie, staggering half-blind out of her bedroom, fumbling with trembling hands for a wake-up fag, asks him what the hell’s so funny this morning, what’s got into him? He grins, that effortless affable grin that has brought him to these premises (what’s got into him? well, for one thing, he woke up a short while ago with the handsomest hard-on in a dog’s age, dreaming of his old Irish WAC girlfriend, they were both stark naked, running around in France somewhere in the middle of the war, he wasn’t even sure which side of the lines they were on or who was winning or losing, but they were balling the jack something fantastic, out in the open fields, in tents and bivouacs, village streets, in the mud of the trenches, and the only thing spoiling the fun at all was a weird little runny-nose private — he looked foreign or Jewish or something — who kept wandering by looking miserable and threatening to tattle on them…but somehow even this was exciting in its way), and says: “Hey, listen, Mamie, what do you think of this: Hemmed in by masonry and, uh, by masonry walls confined to thin streets, boys, let me assure you, in New York even as in Kansas they have found ways to enjoy themselves without hurt to property or to their elders, the farm boy and the tenement boy are one, ahem, at heart. That’s what I’m trying to get at.” He smiles. His wife stares at him for a moment through squinting eyes. Then she grunts, shrugs, and shuffles back into her bedroom. “I should say, or remind you,” he calls after her, “that does not mean that we can forget about the unforgenate, uh, FORTCH-inut circumstances growing up — which many young per — people grow up in trusting that good will! Ah, will flower out of evil! At least that is my opinion!” He has meanwhile pressed down another Eisenhopper, having glimpsed his own secretary coming in the door behind him: the hopper leaps with a loud BO-I–I-ING! the secretary squeals, Ike’s laughter booms.
The President’s assistant, Sherman (The Abominable No-Man) Adams, is in the Oval Office laying out the President’s agenda for the day, which includes a Cabinet meeting, a therapy session with the stricken Bob Taft, and a possible address to the nation after the Supreme Court meets at noon. Adams, hearing all the shrieking and laughter and seeing the President promenading out on Harry’s Balcony in his pee jays, wonders if, by coincidence, Eisenhower woke up this morning in the same state of oddly disturbing excitement that he’d experienced himself. It’s impossible, of course, for Sherm Adams to know, but were a poll to be taken, he would discover that not only he and the President, but also most of Congress, the Supreme Court, lesser courts and commissions, the Fourth Estate, Cecil B. De Mille and Cardinal Spellman, the Holy Six, the Vice President sacked out on his living-room couch, and the entire Cabinet — even old Ezra Taft Benson of the Council of Twelve Apostles — have all awakened this morning from the foment of strange gamy dreams with prodigious erections and enflamed crevices. Some, like Irving Saypol, have wisecracked about it. Others, like Foster Dulles, have felt furtive and guilty. It has made Joe McCarthy boisterously reckless, Felix Frankfurter confused, the Boy Judge grumpy, Emily Post gay. Edgar Hoover has taken a cold bath. But none, curiously enough, has used his or her aroused sexuality on a mate, it’s as though, somehow, that’s not what it was all about, and all are left in a state of suspended agitation, feeling itchy and faintly irreverent, giddy and bemused yet unsatisfied, somehow detached and isolated, but gregarious at the same time, and with an unwonted appetite for risk and profligacy. Which makes them nervous. Hoo-eee! have to take it easy today or things could go haywire. Few, however, can put their finger on what it is that’s disquieting them. One who has no such difficulty is the Sing Sing Executioner Joseph Francel. Brushing his teeth in his bathroom in Cairo, New York, Joe winces at himself in the mirror (his is frankly hurting him) and says: “Hmf. (Spit.) Better get down to Times Square this morning.”
Times Square, the Crossroads of the World: it is said that half the people on Forty-second and Broadway at any given moment are from out of town — and the other half are Armenians. Shabby by day, luminescent by night, it is the most paradoxical place in all America, and thus the holiest. Historians have written that everything that happens in the Western World originates in Times Square and — to judge by the souvenir shops, auction galleries, gutter debris, and panhandlers — dies here as well. The Heart and Cock of the Country, it is called. Sin City U.S.A. The Entertainment Capital of America. The United States is the first electric nation of the world, and this is its luminous navel. The Diamond Stickpin in New York’s Shirtfront. The Brightest Ten Blocks in the World. Here pilgrims come to kiss the holy stones, the despised second sons of the world to seek their fortunes, mystics to walk the Great White Way.
There is an ancient tradition for this. Nomadic tribes crisscrossed the island for centuries, and transience is the profoundest element in the American Spirit. Broadway itself, as legend has it, is an old Indian trail — certainly this would explain its erratic polestar course down through the island. It’s said the last to use it were the Mana-hatta tribe, who departed by it after nicking gullible old Peter Minuit, first of the tourist yokels, for twenty-four dollars. Many Italians have come here, more than there are Italians in Italy, but the first was a navigator named Verrazano, who claimed the island for the French. Next came an Englishman named Henry Hudson on behalf of the Dutch, who named it Niew Nederland and commenced to settle it. The English wrested it from the Dutch in the name of the Duke of York, then lost it to their rebellious colonials a century later (even then, the inhabitants of Medcef Eden’s meadows, eventually to become Times Square, stayed out of it, played both sides, and raked what profit off the Revolution they could). By the time it had become the Capital of the United States of America and seen in its streets the Incarnation of General George Washington as Superchief I, there were more than thirty thousand people, heterochthonous the lot of them, passing through the borough’s precincts, and half that many again in nearby Breuckelen, Bronck’s Land, Queens, and Staaten Eylandt.
Now, a little over a century and a half later, there are seven and a half million people living in 116 villages around Times Square, these in turn surrounded by another 574 suburban communities of millions more, and half of them are foreign-born or one or more of their parents were. The huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse, getting processed for destiny now in Uncle Sam’s melting pot. Lithuanians, Thais, Persians, Jamaicans: this is the place of their initiation into Americanism, the Great White Way. The heaviest migrations come west from Italy and Russia, but there are thousands upon thousands of Germans and Czechs, too, and Irish, Austrians, Hungarians, English, and Welsh. And it is these, the tired, poor, and tempest-tost, more American, as they say, than the Americans, who each year play host to the summer inswarm of country boobs, come east to Mecca like flies drawn to a pig’s ass.