Speak Easy

Second floor: staff digs. Six to a suite unless you’re management, but a suite’s a suite. Nobody does much but sleep down on two anyhow. You don’t get to kick up your feet with a pipe and a British novel round these parts. Bellhops hit duty like a punching bag at 3 a.m. Concierges swap out like the royal guard at noon and midnight, front desk girls in lipstick and victory rolls run nine-hour shifts of flash-teeth-when-you-smiles and and-your-key-sirs. Kitchens never do close, and cleaning never does stop. Uniforms so green you’d swear they were grown in a Swiss meadow hang like six smart ghosts in each parlor, brass buttons polished, caps jaunty even without a head to hold them up or a hand to tip them.

Frankie Key is an egg-hop by day and a pneumatic boy by night. He shares 212 with a pair of twins out of Texas everyone calls Nickel and Dime, a Vermont college boy name of Murray Keen, a preacher’s son born under the sorry name of Hallelujah Barnes, though he’s shortened that up to Hal now, and Enzo Bacchi, a painter from some nothing town in the Swiss Alps who covers every hidden surface of the room with miniature cosmic ragtime parades, goblins and gargoyles and gamines and gallants dancing under the lip of every windowsill, the ledge of every counter-top, the under-slats of all six beds, the back of the medicine cabinet, even the inside of the broken faucet in the kitchen, wherever the boss-men won’t see it when they come on inspection. Room 212 has a secret Hieronymus shindig shaking down all over itself, and sometimes her boys lie flat on the parlor floor, six heads spread in a star, looking up at the underside of Enzo’s heart.

All those sweet boys used to work as caddies on some rich man’s great huge lawn, so that’s what most everyone called them. Those Caddies, ain’t they swell?

Now, Frankie, he was born in Minnesota but mostly got to walking and talking in Buffalo, that upstate snow-show with barely a canal and a train-line to rub together. Some eighth of a cousin of his wrote a song you probably know. Daddy was a pharmaceutical man, selling Well-Being door to door. Mama was a greengrocer’s daughter with moles on her middle knuckles, all ten of them, like little pinpricks for marionette strings. Sent their boy to Catholic school to learn what boys learn there, which is mostly how not to be a Catholic ever again. Missed the war by a hair—Armistice did her cannonball splash while Frankie was learning how to march and salute and un-rifle, then re-rifle, then un-rifle a rifle in some swamp in Alabama. The war he didn’t fight sticks on him like shit on a shoe. He can still smell it, even though nobody else can, even though his sole is clean.

Frankie, he loved his green-hand Mama like the rest of us loved Kentucky rye, and that’s the truth. Every Friday he put a little lavender envelope into the gloved hand of Mr. Raspail F. Bayeux, head Concierge, stamped for Buffalo with love. She did love purple, Mrs. Key. These days you and I and anybody would pay all our little pennies for one of those envelopes, for his sharp, bright, sly paragraphs of mother-love and city-woes. But Buffalo takes no prisoners.

So let’s all be Frankie for a spell. Up we go at the crack of better-dead-than-out-of-bed, two hours sleep if it was a minute, one leg into our billiard-green trousers, then the other. Shirt, coat, hat-strap tight under our chin, gloves, shoes slicker than glass. Into the lift, screen shut tight, and up, up, up through all the s

leeping continents of the world inside the Artemisia, the only world that counts. Up, darling, always up. The soul of Frankie Key points up and its the only direction that seems friendly. Down’ll getcha if you get sleepy and happy with what you got. So up we go. Up past the Green Tabernacle restaurant on four where the day’s first bread is busy rising and the coffee-troughs are already brimming. Up past that mess on seven with the dueling pharmacists who have to give serious think-space every day to whether or not to shoot each other in the hall. Up past the torch-singer on ten crying through her scales. Up past the sixteenth floor, where the weird wizardry of room assignments had either fallen asleep on the job or shown up early for work, depending on your attitude. This is where the front desk dumped all the bookbinders, librarians, novelists (but not short story writers, columnists, or playwrights), editors, illustrators, and two genuine muses on tap for the convenience of all, Lily Greer, the great Vaudeville boy-dresser and scissor-swallower, and Dandelion Bruno, pretty Dandy Brute who killed a fella in St. Louis ’cause he stole a rose out of the boy’s lapel. On sixteen all the doors stand open and every parlor is choking on books. You can walk right in and borrow anything you like, sit in a nice chair and peruse yourself a fine leather volume. If you have the time. Which we do not. Up past the penthouses on twenty and onto the roof, the green dewy roof all full of chickens and goats and morning.

Frankie likes it up here. You can see the whole city, lights still out, quiet as a church. He named the chickens after ancient queens—it’s the sort of thing Frankie likes to imagine telling folk he did when he was young, so he does it. Boudicea, Theodora, Elizabeth, Mathilda, Antoinette—but they’re all white Delawares so he can’t tell them apart anyway. Come on, Messalina, he calls the hundreds of them all together, time to send your heirs to the slaughter. And he fills up his baskets with warm brown eggs while they purr and mew and chuckle, more like kittens than the great old dinosaur-cousins they are. Enzo’ll be up to milk the goats later, and Nickel and Dime to hack of hunks of honeycomb from the hives while they sing old cowboy songs to Rutherford, who thinks, privately, that those boys can’t sing for shit. And egg-boys, more egg-boys, a dozen and more, to bring down breakfast to the little nations of the Artemisia, free of charge, golden and rich as the sun on a day nobody’s fucked up yet.

Let’s all feel our hearts crammed in Frankie’s chest, feel us churning up, wheeling, bonging, squishing blood down to our undersides as the lift drops down and the fifteenth floor gets nearer, and with the fifteenth floor Room 1550, and with Room 1550 all those beautiful girls like princesses dancing through their shoes, but especially Zelda Fair, opening the door with that sleepy, heavy, sharp, hot look her eyes have, saying the same thing every day like it’s the first day and she’s never seen an egg before.

“Oh! You shouldn’t have.”

And what’s Frankie’s night shift? Never you mind. Mr. Slake signs his bellboy checks every month, but Frankie’s other job doesn’t tally in that dandified ledger with such nice, gold-tipped pages. He punches in at 9 pm on the tenth floor, half way to heaven and halfway to the pit. What he does there pays a whole sight better than chicken farming. And it’s Al who signs those notes, with a signature like a scream in the dark.

872

Got all that? Have I dramatised our personae to the hilt? I know it’s tough to keep all the cards in order, my chickies, but I’m doing my best. It’s ok. I wouldn’t leave you in the lurch without a flashlight. Just shine it on over here. Zelda and Ollie and Opal and Olive and the pelican Mr. Puss-Boots, Frankie and Enzo and Murray Keen and Nickel and Dime with their matching dimples, Caspar and poor pissed off Pearl and their Little Cass who thinks blue blood smells like fox farts, Gogol the jaguar, Ogedei the eagle, Marlowe the swell lion, Lily Greer with her vaudeville drag show, and Al, dandy Al in his cherry-cream suit with rosemary in his lapel, Al, who don’t care for the light, waiting down there in the basement for us to come to him. Don’t worry. He’ll keep.

Harold Kloburcher shacks up in Room 872 with a lady who isn’t his wife, but she isn’t not his wife, either. Miss Georgiette’s actually married to some ether-man down in Baltimore, but she can’t stand the sight of him and he can’t stand the sight of her and there’s only so much marriage you can huff through a wet rag before somebody hits the road. But Georgiette and Harold have their sympatico locked up tight in a jar and they’ve been playing house for coming on ten years now.

They’re in the same line of work, see. Harry’s a locksmith and Georgie’s a madam. They both let you in when you’re shut out. Oh, Georgie wouldn’t call it that. But everybody knows where to go when you want somebody lying under you who knows how to look like they want to be there. And if you’re a little short on rent and shorter still on the lessons your mama gave you before you lit out for the big city, just head on down to 872 and tell Miss G you’ve got a powerful thirst for some of her darjeeling, sugar, no lemon. She’s got a painting of dogs hunting a unicorn on the wall over the fireplace. Opens on a hinge like the door to paradise. On the backside she’s hung up a broadsheet with all the names and prices and dates available, split into a Girls column and a Boys column, and whaddya know but they’re about the same length. Georgie wouldn’t use your real name—she’s a class act all the way according to her own self, and she learned from her locksmith hunk the sacred trust that goes along with knowing how to get a key in anywhere you like. Discretion, pets. The State Department has fewer code names than Georgiette Boursaw’s unicorn painting. All out of fairy tales, on account of her sweet, soft childhood in Albany, when she loved to read about maidens and towers and horses and dragons, before the man with the fabulous gas and the big slurry fists came to show her how to dance the Sleeping Beauty rag.

So this week, which is Christmas week 1924, if you’re into that sort of thing, you can have Cinderella for six dollars fifty but keep it out of her mouth, thanks. Or Snow White for a fiver, though you can’t kiss her. Rapunzel’s going for ten bucks even, but it’s a bargain for a contortionist who likes to be choked. Prince Charming will cost you seven, Joringel four, poor wee lamb chop can’t outlast a lit match but oh, those blue eyes will kill you dead. And Clever Jack wants a prince’s ransom, twelve smackers, but you can do anything you like and he’s hung like a Stone Age statue. Oh, you could get it all for less out on the town, but why bother when the Artemisia will send up room service nice and neat?

Everyone gets a new name in the Artemisia. The front desk is Ellis Island backwards—come Elizabeth Smith and find yourself Licorice Lizzy of the Cigarette Soul before you hit the elevator.

So imagine Miss Georgie’s eyes when Zelda Fair comes knocking shy, big eyes all haunted-hollow, wearing her respectable clothes, a grey dress with buttons instead of rosettes and rhinestones. Georgie knows that hollow look. That look that says golly gee ma’am I never done this before but I love this damn heap of bricks and I’m just a little short this month… And the money she could get for Zelda, without even haggling! She’s already poured tea and plated out iced cookies and named the girl Gretel in her head before Zelda clears her throat and twists her hands and asks to see Mr. Kloburcher instead. Too bad, Georgie. So sad.

Harold feels mighty pleased to be called on. He works locks for the hotel and he works on the quiet, too, on the side—sometimes a body doesn’t want the front desk knowing their business. He likes his hush-hush jobs best. He feels like a spy, on one knee, fiddling the tumblers till secrets pop free. He looks Miss Z up and down and figures he’ll make a roast chicken tonight, to feed Georgie’s disappointment. But now Zelda Fair’s looking at him with that face, that tea-cake chin, that gin-sloe smile, and her throat’s all red above her collarbone, which is, Harold guesses, how somebody like her blushes when they blush at all.

“Tell us all your troubles, sweetheart,” he says in his best plummy grandfather voice that practically lights a pipe with its vowels. “You wanna try locksmithing this week? Little fingers like yours, could be your Goodies in spades.”

Zelda laughs, but it’s a little, short laugh, the kind that isn’t really a laugh at all. Just punctuation. “Sometimes funny things happen in this world, don’t they, Mr. K? I mean, the world’s so damn big everything’s bound to happen that can happen, and probably some things that can’t.”

“I suppose so.”

“And when funny things happen, you just have to go along, don’t you? Because they might never happen again and you’ll have missed the joke of it, missed the fun, and then when you’re old and your kittens ask you what you did when the world had its glad rags on, you won’t have nothing to say, will you?”

“Honey, I don’t follow you.”

“You need a drink, baby girl?” Georgiette asks, just as sweet as a pie filled with aunties. “I think we got some anise in the cupboard.”

Zelda takes it in a little green crystal glass and for a second she’s so dazzled by the winter light streaming through the window streaming through the glass and streaming onto her knuckles like emerald licorice rings that she forgets to talk and her mind whangs off thinking about how anise ought to be black, or at lease purple, the way licorice is, but it’s as white as a window pane…

Georgie’s talk bubbles all over, bicarbonate of gossip. “I got it straight from the source, no need to worry, lovie. Nothing foul in there. Harry, did you hear three people died of that ginger poison at Bill Radner’s jake joint last week? I don’t even look at the stuff unless I saw the man downstairs tap it with his own hand. You drink up, Zelda. Your color’s out.”

“I’m sorry!” Zelda snaps back into Room 872 and shoots back her licorice like water. “I’m sorry. I feel like I’m made of paper these days. Gotta pile rocks on me to keep me from flying away.”

“Red meat,” Georgie prescribes. She knows from paper girls. Does she ever. “Red meat and brown liquor. Roots you to the earth. Keeps you hot. I’ve got some steaks in the icebox, dear. I’ll wrap them up for you. Just fry them with a little butter, two minutes a side. Eat up all the fat, too, suck the bones. I’ll know if you don’t.”

Zelda tries to refuse but Georgiette would mother a hole in the wall. That’s what comes of Albany and Buffalo and slurping down a thousand stories where nobody’s got a mother worth spitting on. She comes back with a brown paper parcel and a little round