King 15
During the American Revolution, the Passaic Hotel was a gathering place of rebel leaders.
Washington and Lafayette spent hours talking with the son of its owner, some locals nicknamed "Peter the Helpless," because a grotesque illness had left him a near invalid. Most people called Peter "the big-headed man" because his head was nearly as large as his pathetic body. Someone had rigged up a chair with wheels that allowed the boy/man to get around through the halls and tavern. But neither Washington nor Lafayette seemed to pity Peter.
They came to talk with him. For it seemed Peter had been endowed with a mind as good as his body was bad, and both revolutionary heroes found Peter refreshingly intelligent -- in a world of farms, farmers and Dutch slave owners.
Years later, as a very old man, Lafayette would return to the Passaic Hotel looking for Peter, only to be told that Peter had died before his 40th birthday.
************
Ruth MacCormack stared down at the stained café table as I sat down across from her. Her green eyes seemed particularly focused on each stain as if she felt the urge to scrub them off. She had worked the Paterson’s bar circuit for the better part of 15 years climbing out of the filth of cheap tricks to become a more or less respectable barmaid at Wolfman’s Place on Market Street for three years prior to the shooting at the Falls.
“I’m not asking you to turn anybody over,” I said, easing the notepad from my pocket slowly so as not to alarm her. “All I want to do is to get a picture of what went on here leading up to the shooting. The owner told me you new Zarra better than anybody at the bar.”
“Knew him?” she said, glancing up, her stare intensely penetrating, especially framed by her red-hair. “I don’t know anything about him expect that he showed up regular,” she said.
“What do you mean by regular?”
“With him it was once a week,” she said. “Usually on Sunday nights, although that changed once he hooked up with Patty.”
“You mean the dancer?”
“I mean the bitch,” Ruth snarled. “If it wasn’t for her, he wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“How long had Zarra been a regular here?”
Ruth shrugged. “It’s hard to say when people show up. You don’t notice some people until they’ve been coming for a while.”
“A rough guess.”
“Sometime late last year,” Ruth said.
“You mean December 1986?”
“Maybe earlier than that. I seem to recall he was around before Thanksgiving.”
“But the trouble didn’t start until much later?”
“If you mean the trouble with Patty, I remember exactly when it started.”
“You mean that night in March?”
“Yes,” Ruth said. “He came in depressed. I don’t know why, but he looked sadder than usual. Most of the times, he’d wave to me from the door, grin, and then duck down into one of the café tables here to avoid having Wolfman spot him.”
“Didn’t Wolfman like him?”
“Wolfman didn’t like his writing in his notebooks,” Ruth said. “He thought it was bad for business to have anybody doing anything but looking at the dancers. He told me that if someone like Maxwell spent his time with his nose in a book, people would begin to think something was wrong with the place and stop coming.”
“What did Zarra write?”
“I never asked him directly, but he sometimes mumbled about catching some of the flavor of the place. He seemed to think the other patrons were interesting characters.”
“And you don’t?”
“To me they’re mostly drunks or perverts.”
“And yet you worked here?”
“Better to work behind a bar to deal with them than flat on my back,” she said.
“What about that night?”
“I remember hearing the door slam. Wolfman had installed a new spring on the door so it would close tight. He kept grumbling about how he didn’t want to have to pay public service to heat up the neighborhood. Almost everybody that came in that night had it slam behind them.”
“But you remember Zarra in particular.”
“Because he looked so sad,” Ruth said. “He didn’t wave. He didn’t even look at me. But he looked startled when the door slammed.”
“Did he say why he was unhappy?”
“Not in so many words. And not right away. I remember it being a busy night – still cold, but with enough hint of spring for people to want to get out after being cooped up. And it was late enough for Wolfman to have turned down the bar lights, which meant the dancer was supposed to go on. Most of the patrons wanted their drinks on hand so they didn’t miss any of the show by having to order once the girl started.”
“Was this a rowdy crowd?”
Ruth gave a stiff grin. “Not in Wolfman’s Place. Wolfman wouldn’t tolerate any of that. A man might get a bit fresh with the girls, then he’d get bounced. He might get loud or a little too drunk. Then he’d also get bounced. Sometimes, if you got bounced, you could come back another night. Sometimes, you had to wait a few weeks. If you really pissed Wolfman off, he told you to stay out permanent. Most people got the message and behaved. Those that didn’t didn’t come back. Most of our crowd are working people, or those who retired, bus drivers, truck drivers, trash men, night watchmen, that sort.”
“But Zarra’s wasn’t that sort, was he?”
“In some ways he was, in others not at all. He did run a local restaurant, and her served meals to a number of the men at the bar.”
“But he was a songwriter and poet,” I said. “Hardly the kind of character you said frequented the bar.”
“Actually, it was that part of him that made him come to the bar when he did. He told me he liked the grit of the place. ‘This is where the real people are,’ he said.”
“By which he meant?”
“I don’t know exactly. He seemed to think there was more honesty here than in other places where people were more successful?”
“Honest?”
“He kept talking about primitive truth. He didn’t always make sense to me. I know he liked to write about the people he saw here, and kept talking about how they smelled and how they talked – as if body odor, cheap hair tonic and bad breath turned him on.”
Zarra grinned, but slid his notebook to his side to keep the men from anticipating his activity and to keep Wolfman from complaining about his “scribbling.” A small handwritten sign on the wall between the public telephone and the cigarette machine said, “happy birthday, Wolfman,” with several partly deflated blue and white balloons clinging to its edges with Scotch Tape.
Someone – most likely the barmaid Ruth – had also hung gold and silver strands under some of the dim lights just inside the bar, giving the room the odd sensation of rain or a spider’s web rather than a celebration.
In Zarra’s usual spot at the north curve of the oval (as far as possible from Wolfman’s habitual habitat at the extreme south end) sat a hefty grungy bearded man wearing a worn denim sleeveless jacket with the image of a fiery motorcycle sewn on its backs and the single word “Aliens” written above it. Although the stools to either side of this man remained open, Zarra opted for a seat nearer the center of the bar, despite its unappealing location as the narrowest section closest to the dance stage.
Regulars at Wolfman’s generally avoided these seats, leaving them open for the uninitiated who hungrily accepted ring side seats closest to the dancer.
The gala – as another birthday sign called it – had brought out additional faces Zarra saw only infrequently, and almost never on a week night, nervous, weary characters, who spent most of the time staring into their drinks or mumbling to each other about wives, jobs and the additional taxes the city had heaped on them this year.
Wolfman – a monstrous ex-football profession with a black beard that parted only for his wide mouth and his dilated nostrils – sat on his usual stool at the southern more portion of the bar at the point which the bartenders and dancers entered or exited. He alone had taken no notice of Zarra’s loud arrival, caught up in a perpetual banter with his collection of favored customers – toad-like minions who curried his favor for the privilege of sitting so close, who gain and lost favor to the frequent changes of Wolfman’s changing moods.
At this moment, Wolfman’s eyes shone with the reflected light of the fifty candles Ruth had injected into the surface of a massive flat cake, fifty candles flickering to near extinction as the big man made ready to blow them out.
Zarra eased onto the unfamiliar seat, drawing Ruth’s immediate and delighted attention. The frail red head rushed across the bar grinning at him, snatching up a glass with one hand and a bottle of his regular light beer with the other, placing both before him like a sacred offering, adding a napkin and a bit of advice.
“Don’t let Wolfman’s shit-eating grin fool you,” she said. “He’s in a mean mood, despite it being his birthday.”
“Doesn't he like birthdays?"
“He loves parties, it’s Patty that’s got his dandruff up,” Ruth said. “She wanted extra to dance at the party.”
“Everybody knows she hates these special events,” Zarra said.
“But this is for Wolfman,” Ruth said in a hushed voice. Close up, her she looked a little Like a young Shirley McClain, with the same auburn colored hair and the same boyish cut of hair. Men always mistook her for easy prey, taking little note of the sharp, sometimes frigid look in her deep green eyes.
“He should know better than anybody,” Zarra said.
Wolfman’s wars with Patty had become bar room legend, though so had his undying loyalty for her as a throw back to a time when dancers could still stir up a crowd. Come here often enough, a patron was bound to hear Wolfman’s diatribes on the inadequacies of modern dancers, girls that wore too little, showed too much, and moved too quickly.
"Nice and slow," he frequently told the dancers. "I want you to grind it out for the boys."
Wolfman could never forget the Vaudeville acts that played Paterson when he was a boy, and the slow strippers he used to sneak in to see, and he hired and fired based on those memories with no modern dancer living up to his expectations – except for Patty.
“And I wouldn’t go scribbling anything tonight,” Ruth warned Zarra when she saw his hard-covered note book. “He’s in the kind of mood to put you out.”
Wolfman had warned Zarra on other occasions.
"If you don't pay attention to the girls, people'll think something's wrong with them,” he said. “And once you start getting a reputation like that, people’ll stop coming.”
“But I’m just taking notes.”
“Does this look like a library?”
“Libraries don’t have the kind of people I want to write about.”
“And what kind of people is that?”
“Real people.”
“Real people! There ain't no real people here no more than there are in that empty head of yours. Horny people, I got. Drunk people, I got. But real people? I don't even know what they fucking are."
Yet Wolfman knew.
These men had come here for generations, son seated where father sat, passing on each seat at the bar like an heirloom – upon which any one of them could have tattooed the family crest. The names of their families had long been carved in the bar top. Zarra had listened to these men’s stories, and through them the stories of their fathers and their fathers’ fathers, tracing nearly unbroken linage back to the foundation of the silk mills.
Zarra had won their trust slowly, managing with patience to overcome their natural distrust for newcomers, allowing him to sit on the north end of the bar only after learning his relationship to Charlie, who had once held his own seat here.
“I’ll be good tonight,” Zarra said, sliding a dollar tip across the bar at Ruth as he poured his beer into his glass.
Ruth’s grin was short-lived, wilting as she saw Patty making her way from the ladies room at the rear of the club.
Every head turned in that direction, except for Wolfman’s, though the bare portions of his face flushed with the anticipation of a moment he could already envision.
Patty was not pretty in any conventional sense. She hardly had eyebrows and her mouth stretched across his face like an over extended elastic band, thin-lipped and straight. Nor did her body hold more appeal than slimmer girls who danced here, a bit plump, especially around the rear. But she stroke ahead with such arrogance men followed each foot step, their stares unable to focus on any other action in the room.
Wolfman alone seemed critical, and grunted when she reached the bar.
"You're gained weight," he said.
A stunt driver could not have stopped as abruptly as Patty did, nor wheeled around so decisively to glare at the bearded Wolfman.
"Fuck you!" she snapped.
“No thanks," Wolfman said, easing the soggy remains of his cigar stub for the corner of his mouth. Pinching it between his forefinger and thumb, he studied the object, then stuck it back into the corner where his beard showed the most discoloring. "I've seen what you do to your victims.”
“Fuck you twice!”
“I’m more concerned about the deal we had.”
“What deal?”
"You dance for me only if you keep off the weight."
"Come off it, Jim. You can't afford to fire me. I bring home your bacon."
"I can't afford to have no blimp floating over my dance floor," Wolfman said. "This is a go go club, not the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I'm cutting you off until you lose some weight."
"Cutting me off?" Patty roared. "You mean as in no alcohol?"
"That’s right."
"Why, you son of a ..." Patty snarled, her small fist slashing out to strike his nose.
Wolfman caught her wrist, his huge fingers freezing the attack half way through. “You ever connect and you’re through here,” he said calmly – no humor showing in his deep black gaze.
Patty's fist slowly fell back to her side.
"You're still a son of a bitch," she said. "I got a day job. I get enough aggravation there without having to hear it from you at night as well. You know I can't dance dry. How about a limit? I could live with that."
"How much of a limit?"
"Six drinks."
"One."
"One? Are you fucking out of your mind? Suppose somebody wanted to buy me a drink, am I supposed to say no?"
"You could drink soda."
"Don't make me sick. Four drinks, that's the lowest I'll go."
"Two, or you can go get dressed right now,” Wolfman said, removing the cigar stub again, but this time to wave in the direction of the ladies room from which she had just come.
"Three. That's a good compromise, isn't it?"
Wolfman studied her B the anger in his gaze faded into a look of humored caution.
"All right," he said. "Three. But you make a ruckus when the time comes to cut you off and I'll toss you out. I don't want no riot in here tonight."
Patty grinned, her sharp blue eyes glinting with mock innocence. “Me? Cause trouble?”
"Yeah, you," Wolfman said. "Now get your quarters and set up your music before I change my mind. I don't know why I'm so kind to you. I don't let any of the other girls get away with talking the way you do."
"None of the other girls deliver the way I do.”
"Get!"
Ruth put five quarters into Patty's palm, then rush to fill the clamor of orders as patrons sought to fill up before Patty’s routine began.
Yet for all the anticipation of her arrival, few of these men stared directly when Patty made her way along the outside of the oval bar to feed the jukebox – none willing to draw her specific attention. None stared during her equally prideful march back to the slot next to Wolfman that allowed her inside the oval and access to the stage at its very center.
One mounted on the small platform, Patty surveyed her world, glaring at any oddity, diverted attention or side conversation that did not immediately pertain to her with only new comers or the extremely foolish missing this important clue.
Dressed in a two piece bathing suit that did not emphasize her increased weight, she seemed very plain – just one more plump Polish girl out of the hundreds that wandered into downtown from outlying town’s like Garfield, her wide mouth, her lack of eyebrows, shaping her into something of a cartoon over which only the most unwise grinned.
Once she began to move, all the plainness evaporated.
Zarra was never able to pinpoint all the subtle differences that made her dance seem so superior to the more robotic motions other dancers displayed. Patty simply knew how to move her hips and shift her breasts to catch each male’s eye the way a turned diamond caught light.
It was the way she shifted a hip or crooked a finger, or the way her eyes flashed with sudden fire whenever she caught a man squirming near her. Perhaps, what she did was even too subtle to be called dance, a swaying, shaking, flowing moment that carried over the small stage dragging the blooded stared of the crowd with each gesture. She gyrated, flexed, petted, caressed, soothed. She exposed stretches of flesh no man would have found sexual on any other woman but her. She milked men’s hormones like a milkmaid did a cow, leaving each man exhausted after her attention moved on to someone else.
Unlike other dancers, she refused to caress between her legs, wrap herself around the pole, or pinch her nipples. She just grinding out each man's passion as if against a stone, making each man pay for the privilege of her giving them pain. Men on all sides and in all sizes, shoved bills at her, pushing their paltry offerings into her greedy fingers – each knowing she would show them no appreciation nor mercy, but would continue the relentless torture until they drank the bar dry or crawled out the door beaten.
Down went the lights over the bar top as Wolfman turned up the flood lights above the stage. Suddenly plunged into relative dark, Zarra discarded Ruth’s warnings and eased his notebook onto the circle-scarred surface. He sipped his beer, then eased the pen out of his front pants pocket and placed this side by side with the notebook.
No one had noticed him. All gazes, including Wolfman’s, remained focused on the one bright element in the room, shifting and slithering to the backbeat of the jukebox. Zarra waited aa few more moments discovery before making his next move, he opened the notebook and began to jot down descriptions of the people around him: images of self-torture showed on many of their faces, squeezed out of squinting eyes or pursed lips. Some of these men, Zarra knew from conversations, could barely speak English let alone read or write competently, and yet all seemed to speak the same language when it came to the woman on the stage, a terrible urgency they could not satisfy, peaked by her provocative moments. Zarra jotted as fast as he could to capture each expression in words, hoping to later shape these impressions into poetry or maybe even song, though for the most part, they remained character sketches he sometimes fell back on just to recall the intensity of feelings he saw.
"And just what the fuck do you think you're doing?" the dancer snapped, her sharp voice rising shrilly above the bass notes of the jukebox.
At first, Zarra did not know whom she meant, presuming she had picked another victim to focus more personal torture on, the way she routinely did during her nights dancing. But he did notice how the other men stirred around him, some even shifting their seats away from his, and when he glanced up from his jotting, he saw her blue eyes staring straight down at him and his notebook.
Everything had stopped but the music. Every eye in the room had turned in Zarra’s direction, as if each scribble had emitted a magnetic attraction to which their gazes were subject. His pen halted in mid-word, as he glanced up at her, a tunnel of light and dark forming between them that seemed to exclude all else.
"Well?" she asked.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, snapping shut the book with the uncapped pen still inside.
One song ended, another started. But Patty did not move, despite the hard back beat of the dance music and the murmuring of the men to either side of the bar. Not a muscle in her body moved, except for those controlling her gaze, and that jerked between the notebook and Zarra’s face.
“Don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about,” she growled, taking a step towards his side of the stage, as she jabbed a sharp red finger nail in the direction of his book. “That’s what I’m talking about. I see you here night after night scribbling into that damned book. What are you writing about? Are you a detective? Or are you the next great American novelist?”
Zarra sighed, and put his hand over the cover of the notebook, the movement sending his moist bar napkin fluttering to the floor.
Other dancers in other bars had asked the similar questions from time to time, most presuming him a student or a teacher from the community college doing or grading homework. He often promoted this idea afraid people would act unnaturally if they suspected him of documenting their lives.
Whenever people persisted on knowing, he generally abandoned the bar, seeking another place where he might write in peace. Yet few places were so rich in raw characterization as Wolfman’s place was, and he hated the idea of abandoning it just because of a nosy dancer. He glanced away, looking towards the other men around the bar, most of whom avoided his gaze, most of whom sought lack of notoriety for other reasons.
"Are you going to tell me what's in that notebook, or do I have to come down there and see for myself?" Patty asked.
"It's nothing," Zarra mumbled. “Just some notes.”
“So you take notes while I’m dancing?” Patty asked, her voice booming as one of her songs ended. “Do I look like a biology experiment?”
“I’m taking notes like that,” Zarra mumbled, the last sentence lost to the next song as Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” filled the room.
"Maybe you don't think I'm sexy enough to pay attention to?" Patty said.
“I never said that.”
“Am I pretty?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t hear you.”
“I said you’re very pretty.”
"Liar!"
The word hung in the air like the aftermath of a pistol shot, drawing the up the shy faces of the other men as curiosity overcame their fear of attention, each set of eyes pointed at Patty or Zarra, each face sculpted with levels of amusement.
“You are, too, pretty,” Zarra argued, vaguely aware of Wolfman at the far end of the bar, whose expression clearly countered any amusement the other men showed, his cigar stub circling in an angry oval as he gnawed on its end.
“Stop yapping, Patty, and dance,” Wolfman shouted. “I don’t pay you money to stand there like fucking Macy’s window mannequin.”
“I don’t dance if I’m not appreciated,” Patty shouted back.
"You'll do what I tell you," Wolfman growled,, placing his hands flat on the bar as he pushed himself up out of his stool.
Zarra sighed, recovered all but two of the moist bills Ruth had left on the bar top as changed, then slid off his stool.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Patty barked, turning her vigilant gaze on him again.
“Home,” Zarra mumbled.
"Coward.”
"What the hell do you want from me ?"
"A drink," Patty said. "And for you to pay attention to me. Is that too much to ask?"
The music had ended with the expiration of the coins Patty had previously fed the jukebox so the whole bar rustled with the discomfort of the impatient patrons: shifting stools, thumping empty glasses, struck matches for cigarettes, and this aching silent anticipation Zarra was expected to fill.
"No," Zarra mumbled. "It's not too much to ask."
“Then sit there until I’m through with my set,” she said.
Wolfman glaring as much at Zarra as he was at his dancer, sent one of his minions scurrying down the far side of the bar to feed a few more quarters into the jukebox. The music started again, one of the generic top forty tunes most of the other dancers used that Patty generally avoided. She gave Wolfman a dark look then went through the motions of her dance until these tunes expired.
Meanwhile Ruth hurried over to Zarra with dire warnings about not opening his notebook again and leaving the bar as soon as possible so as to not inspire any more of Wolfman’s wrath.
“He’s very, very angry at you,” she whispered. “He’s throw you out, but he’s wary of Patty’s mood. Don’t sit too long with her when she comes over. Just buy her a drink then get out.”
“You make it sound as if my life might be in danger,” Zarra said with a weary laugh.
“That wouldn’t be far from the facts,” Ruth said. “But you're just too nice to get tangled in her webs."
"Thanks for the heads up,” Zarra said, taking a shaky sip of his remaining beer.
"I mean it. Walk away."
Ruth might have said more, but other patrons began to clamor for refills once Patty’s set finished -- many of them increasingly thirsty after the recent drama.
Down at the end of the bar, Wolfman grabbed Patty’s arm as she pushed by. She stared down coldly a his large hand, then up at his face.
"You want something?" she asked.
"Stay away from the poet," Wolfman said.
"Poet?" Patty said, glancing towards Zarra, an increased interest glimmering in her eyes.
"I'm warning you to leave off him," Wolfman said.
"Why? Are you afraid I'll break your little toy boy?"
Wolfman slowly shook his head, though his black eyes stayed fixed on Patty's face.
"You know why?" he said. "The Boss wouldn't like it."
"The Boss doesn't own me any more," Patty snapped, then worked her way out of Wolfman's grip, and headed to the Lady's room to get changed.
Wolfman crooked his forefinger at Ruth, who hurried down the inside of the bar to see what he wanted.
"What is it, Wolfman?" she asked.
"Get rid of the poet."
Ruth glanced over her shoulder, then back at Wolfman. "I can't. He bought her a drink."
"Refund his money."
"That still doesn't make it right," Ruth said, clicking her pink lips with a nervous tongue. " You can't just toss him out with no reason."
"Refund for all his drinks," Wolfman growled, slapping his palm down on the bar. "And if he still won't go, tell him I'll toss him out myself. You hear?"
"All right, Wolfman," Ruth said, holding up her small hands as if she expected an attack. "I'll get rid of him."
Ruth turned sharply, with all the skill of a soldier in practice drills, marched quickly back the way she'd come, along the west side, stopping as sharply as she'd started, in front of Maxwell.
"You got to leave," Ruth said, dropping a ten dollar bill on the moist bar, the liquid turning the green a shade darker as it soaked in towards Lincoln's face.
Maxwell glanced at the bill then at Ruth, his think brows folding down over his puzzled eyes. "What?"
"Wolfman says to get out," Ruth said, pushing the bill towards Zarra's side of the bar with the tips of her fingers. The bill crumpled rather than moved.
"But why?"
"Who cares why," Ruth said, leaning forward, the smell of violets rising from her shoulders and hair. "Just hurry up before the bitch gets back and we have a real to do."
"But I...." Zarra said, indicating the still full glass waiting on Patty.
"Wolfman's taken care of it," Ruth said, again indicating the bill on the bar.
"Does this mean I’m banned?" Zarra asked.
Wolfman routinely excluded customers who could not keep their hands off the dancers, or instigated fights at the bar, a mental list of exiles he never let back into the bar.
"No," Ruth said with another anxious glance towards Wolfman and the ladies room beyond him. "But if you don’t leave right now, he might ban you."
"All right," Maxwell said, then reluctantly rose.
Wolfman only nodded as Zarra left.
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