Snow Was General All O'er Ireland...

On the eve of our first real snowfall of the season, from possibly the single best piece of short fiction ever written in the English language:

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

-- from "The Dead" by James Joyce, in Dubliners

On "Avatar," "Lord of the Rings" and "Gangs of New York" and Why Motion Capture and Green Screen Will Never Replace Live Action Acting and Filming on Back Lot Sets and Locations

Jim Cameron's Avatar is set for a holiday-weekend opening, and already his detractors are sharpening their knives. Costing $380 million to make and market (on a production budget of $230 million), Avatar, which is Cameron's first feature since Titanic, is among the most expensive films ever made. Employing an innovative camera system allowing the director to "fly" a virtual camera through a computer-generated world, much of the action is depicted using CGI and the motion-capture technology which allowed Peter Jackson to render Gollum based upon Andy Serkis' performance on a green-screen stage in his Lord of the Rings trilogy. It is estimated that the film will have to do $217 million domestically to recoup its costs (by comparison, Titanic did $600 million domestically, and $1.84 billion worldwide). Shot in 3-D, part of what is riding on its success or failure is the extent to which audiences will pay a premium price to sit through a 3D feature.

Whether Avatar ultimately proves to be DeMille's Birth of a Nation, on the one hand, or Cimino's Heavens Gate, on the other, I doubt that the CGI motion-capture technology will make a heavy inroad as against live-action sequences for all but unique character parts.

C O N T I N U E D...

Cassandra's monologue from "Going Home"

When I first moved to New York, in the early eighties, I lived for a while in a renovated Old Law (dumbbell) tenement in Chelsea. My next-door neighbor was a late middle-aged woman who had been living, for years, in the un-renovated tub-in-kitchen version of my apartment. She was usually very nice, but was sometimes given to loud one-sided aggressive declaratory conversations with Jesus in the wee hours of the morning. I later learned that she suffered from schizophrenia, and was always one disability check away from being out on the street. At the time, rapacious New York landlords were emptying SRO buildings through any means that they could find, fair and foul, and were often "warehousing" the empty buildings until the market turned in their favor.

One day, I read in the News the sad story of a little girl on the Lower East Side who had been playing beneath the stoop of her building and was killed when the stoop collapsed on top of her. She was a very well-loved child and the neighborhood was very tight. It was one of those moments in a neighborhood, a much smaller version of the General Slocum disaster from eighty years before, when you could practically hear a collective keening arise from scores of kitchens where mothers were cooking dinner, empty lots where kids were playing stoop-ball and in Tompkins Square Park where she was memorialized by sad-eyed men.

This was the first thing that I ever wrote for an actor, and it was given wonderful voice by the late Rosanna Carter of the Negro Ensemble Company.

Scene: The doorway of a former SRO tenement building on the Lower East Side of New York. CASSANDRA, a black homeless woman of indeterminate age, stands at the foot of the stoop with two large paper bags at her side packed with all of her earthly possessions blocking the steps. She addresses PAUL [an actor who has taken a job as the super of an empty tenement building in the process of being renovated].

CASSANDRA

You think I don’t know you? You live here now, in this building, don’t you? You like it? You think it’s built solid, do you? I’m here to tell you. You best be saying your prayers ‘fore you go to sleep at night, ‘cause this building’s liable to fall down any moment.

[beat] You moving away. You think I’m out my mind, don’t you? You sure as hell don’t know me. But I know you.

You read in the paper, sometimes, see on the TV, about some old building fallin' down somewheres. Always seems to be in East New York, South Bronx, Lower East Side... one of them poorer neighborhoods, don't it? Why you spose that be?

What?

Just cause they old? No, chile. I'll tell you why. Old buildings be a lot like old people. They be storing up memories and souls since the day they be built. Souls of everyone who ever lived there. Every gal who give birth over some tub inna kitchen 'cause she be too poor to afford a doctor. Every old man who pass on in his sleep with a bottle in his hands 'cause he don't got no good reason to get up no more. And every little thing that happen in between.

After a while, see, the weight of all them souls starts to press down on the walls, press down on the floors, until something just give way.

No suh. Old buildings don't fall down for no reason at all. Not in these neighborhoods. They collapse from the weight of all the souls they got in 'em, all the life they've seen.

Oh, I know you well enough. You the one they hire to watch this old building they "warehousing" like you say. You the one holdin' the keys. It be getting cold for November. Now, will you let me in my home?

- from Going Home ©1989 Peter Basta Brightbill

Runyon, Riskin and the Pleasures of Adaptation

Part One.  Of Children & Idiots.

Damon Runyon wrote his short story "Madame La Gimp" at the inception of his career as a writer. It was published in October of 1929, in Hearst's Cosmopolitan, two weeks after the market crashed. The story is short, running just more than 6,000 words, but it's seminal - it has inspired two film adaptations ("Lady for a Day," in 1933 and "Pocketful of Miracles," in 1960; both directed by Capra) and at least one radio play of the same name as the short story, performed in 1948 as part of "The Damon Runyon Theater" with great radio voice actors like John Brown (Burns & Allen, "The Life of Riley"); William Conrad (who went on to narrate "The Fugitive" on television), Anne Whitfield and Frank Lovejoy.

Each of the three adaptations suffers from several problems, chief among them being the tendency of the actors to overplay the lines. Runyon writes in such a distinctive voice - always the present tense, never the conditional (i.e., the narrator in MLG, in reaction to a particularly far-fetched story, says "It is commencing to sound to me like a movie such as a guy is apt to see at a midnight show," not "It sounds like a movie that one might see at a midnight show"); and the narrator constantly straining at precision, using diction far more formal than the milieu warrants - that any attempt by an actor to embellish this by overplaying the language ends up rendering Runyon's characters as children or idiots, neither of which they were. In fact, while his work is full of humor, the world that Runyon's characters inhabit is actually quite dark, full of low-level hustlers who barely make their rent by selling bruised apples, flowers from an undertaker or yesterday's news (Apple Annie, in, various incarnations); or by hustling hicks from the sticks out of a fiver at a pool hall (Judge Henry G. Blake) or by suckering rubes out of their traveling money in games of faro on the Deuce (the Pale Face Kid).  Just off of the page, alluded to but never dwelt on, the sons of old money are jumping to their deaths out of windows up and down Wall Street, while men and women of more modest expectations queue up on breadlines and sleep in the Hoovervilles that have sprouted, like mushrooms after a rain, in the Central Park and at the ends of various alleyways and corners of the metropolis.

With this adaptation, I intend to bring Runyon back to his roots. This will be a darker Runyon than audiences are familiar with from the Capra films, one in which - if I am successful and my actors are well-cast and well-directed - Runyon's characters (including the ubiquitous narrator) will be firmly rooted in the denizens of 1920's Broadway who were Runyon's actual pals (e.g., Otto "Abbadabba" Berman, Frank Costello) or people whom he rubbed shoulders with covering the "Main Stem" for the Journal-American (e.g. Heywood Broun and other members of the Algonquin Round Table, and a very young Archie Leach, before he metamorphosed into Cary Grant, stilt-walking adverts for a local haberdashery just off Times Square in between gigs with Prenders Acrobats). At the same time, however, Runyon's characters, like the creations of all great artists, are as much a product of that artist's particular sensibility (in this case, the yearnings of a young boy from Manhattan, Kansas for a life of adventure in the Big City) as they are of the personages he or she observed and, as such, transcend mere reportage. Therefore, I hope that this will also be a Runyon adaptation which will evoke that dream cityscape which is particular, interior and individual to everyone who has ever fallen under the spell of New York City, one which is visible just out the corner of one's vision, and one in which the worst fate that could befall oneself was to be banished forever from the Great White Way.

Ghost in the House: on Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali and the Why the Craft of Writing Resembles Nothing So Much as Boxing

In her 1987 essay, On Boxing, the writer Joyce Carol Oates, who grew up watching boxing at her father's knee, writes of the similarities between writing and boxing, how the heart of both lies more in the rituals leading up to the execution (i.e., the training period for a fighter preparing for a bout, the drafts of a writer) and about the relation of both with Time:

In the boxing ring, the ceremonial ringing of the bell... sets into motion the authority of Time...

When a boxer is "knocked out" it does not mean, as is commonly thought, that he has been knocked unconscious, or even incapacitated; it means rather more poetically that he has been knocked out of Time.  (The referee's dramatic count of ten constitutes a metaphysical parenthesis of a kind through which the fallen boxer must penetrate if he hopes to continue in Time.)... Counted out, he is "dead," in symbolic mimicry of the sport's ancient tradition in which he would very likely be dead.

I have never thought of boxing as a sport.  There is nothing fundamentally playful about it; nothing that seems to belong to daylight, to pleasure.  At its moments of greatest intensity it seems to contain so complete and powerful an image of life - life's beauty, vulnerability, despair, incalculable and often self-destructive courage - that boxing is life, and hardly a mere game...  One plays football, one doesn't play boxing.

In writing my play Stand-Up Guys, I knew that I was drawing on Budd Schulberg's incomparable script for On the Waterfront, just as I was drawing on the story of Pietro Panto and the very real history of the mob on the Red Hook piers.  I knew, of course, that Brando's Terry Malloy was an amateur boxer who had "thrown" some fights at the urging of his brother and knew, further, that there was a lot of brawling, both inside the ring and out, that went on "down the Hook" in 1930's through 1970's.  Finally, being a student of boxing, I knew that fighters like Ali, Patterson and Tyson had trained at Gleason's Gym, back in the day when it was in Manhattan's Tenderloin, and so - after it had moved to DUMBO in 1985 - I went down there and started training there myself.

In 1968 Muhammad Ali came to see Howard Sackler's play The Great White Hope on Broadway, starring a young James Earl Jones. At the time, Ali's boxing license had been suspended and his passport seized at the behest of the federal government over his refusal on religious grounds to fight in Vietnam, and he was reviled by a large segment of white society. After the show, Ali met Jones. The house was empty and the stage was bare, save for the ghost light, when Ali met Jones and told him that the play had affected him deeply "That's my story," Ali said. "You take out the issue of white women and replace it with the issue of religion. That's my story!"

Ali's cornerman, Drew "Bundini" Brown, used the boxer's affinity for Johnson to encourage him in the ring. During several of Ali's major fights, Bundini was heard to call from the corner, "Ghost in the house! Ghost in the house! Jack Johnson's here! Ghost in the house!"

Tony, Louie, "the Skirt" & Me: Life Imitates Art at the 1992 Gotti Trial

Sometimes, stories just fall into your lap. This is one of those stories. It happened to me in the winter of 1992, after I had left a secure government job as an Assistant District Attorney in Brooklyn to pursue my muse as a writer.  I was living in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn at the time, then still heavily italian-american.  The neighborhood was "in transition," as the realtors like to say, with its italian-american population aging and dwindling, and being replaced by young urban professionals.  The neighborhood's connection to its much rougher waterfront past, however, hung over the streets like a fog blown in off the Buttermilk Channel on a winter day.  One day in the late summer of 1992, a flyer appeared taped to lamposts throughout the 'hood.  It recalled nothing so much as a much earlier flyer I had heard of which had appeared, years before on these same blocks, after a neighborhood hero by the name of Pietro Panto had vanished from the piers after having incurred Albert Anastasia's wrath.  (Those flyers bore the likeness of Panto, with the simple inquisitive "Dove Pietro Panto"?  His body was never found).  This flyer, however, was meant as a warning, not a lament.  It bore no text whatsoever, but showed the head of Sammy Gravano grafted onto the body of large rat.  Its meaning was clear.

It is impossible to write about the Italian mafia in the last decade of the 20th Century without writing about the myth of the mafia as portrayed in a dozen movies, chief among them Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, and the way in which life often imitates art, particularly in New York. If you happen into any Italian pizzeria, even today and certainly in the early 1990’s, you would almost certainly find on the walls the following photographic portraits: John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino and Marlon Brando. Of these, the only sure bet was Pacino's photo, as Michael from The Godfather.

Perhaps it has always been true that life has imitated the movies in the culture of the mafia. Perhaps Albert Anastasia, when he ordered that Abe "Kid Twist" Reles be whacked, had in mind a scene from Angels with Dirty Faces, though I sort of doubt it. Just the other day, Junior Gotti just got off on federal racketeering and murder charges, for a fourth time, after the judge declared a mistrial. Maybe life does imitate art, after all. As Faulkner once said, "the past is not dead - it isn't even past."

Without further commentary, here is my memoir from the Gotti trial.  N.B. - From 2005 to 2001, the Gambino crime family was effectively led by Jack (Jack the Nose) D'Amico.  He has since been incarcerated.

It is all of eight-thirty of a gray Friday morning in February of 1992, and I am standing inside of the lobby of the federal courthouse in Brooklyn yawning and trying to blink the sleep out of my eyes. I am a night person by habit, and have grown used to writing until late at night and sometimes into the early hours of the morning. I am not used to being anywhere other than my shower at 8:30 in the morning. But that morning I jumped out of bed and into the shower not an hour before, dressed and ran out the door to catch the IRT into the Heights without even pausing for coffee. I did all of this because John Gotti père was on trial in Brooklyn and I had heard that you had to get there early if you hoped to have any chance of getting in to see what may be the last of the great Cosa Nostra trials of this century.

A few months earlier Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano , consigliere of the Gambino family and Gotti's number two button and trusted friend, faced with the prospect of spending the rest of his life locked up in a very small room, had done the unthinkable: he decided to save his own skin and rat on his friends. It's not that betrayal is unheard of in this world. But nobody rats on his friends. True, former friends have a way of becoming enemies and one can rat on an enemy with impunity. But Sammy Gravano's impending betrayal was of Shakespearean dimension: in cooperating with the feds he had not only betrayed John Gotti and his co-defendant, Frank Locascio (“Frankie Loc”); he had turned his back on the entire world in which he had grown up in and was giving the Feds information about the entire Gambino crime family and the other four families in New York. His own wife had denounced him in public, and, together with their their son and daughter, had refused to accompany him into the federal witness protection program.

In my old neighborhood of Sout' Brooklyn (now called "Carroll Gardens"), a scrappy place where the families of italian-american longshoremen were trying to hang on to their culture long after most of the dockyard jobs had moved across the river to the Jersey piers, a Xeroxed drawing of a rat with Gravano’s head superimposed upon it had appeared overnight taped to streetlights on the corners on Court Street soon after it was announced that Sammy was cooperating with the Feds. It is Gravano’s presence as a cooperating witness that has given the government its first real hope of bringing down "the Teflon Don" after failing to convict him in two prior trials. In the earlier cases the government had suspected that their witnesses or jurors had been reached and compromised, and in one case they were able to prove it.

In this case the Feds, apparently, were taking no chances. Stepping into the lobby I encounter a phalanx of federal Marshalls at the security station. Two Marshalls are running each of two step-through metal detectors and X-ray machines and are doing manual searches with portable detectors when the alarm on the step-through goes off. Three other Marshalls are outfitted like Secret Service agents with headsets, observe the comings and goings of people entering and leaving the building. Past the security station, near the entrance to the elevators, they have placed an information counter manned by yet another Marshall. Behind him, fifteen people are already on line. This doesn't seem like a big crowd to me, but then I remember that the courtrooms in the Brooklyn federal courthouse are quite a bit smaller than their state counterparts and have limited seating.

After making my way through security without incident, I approach the Marshall at the desk and ask him what my chances are of getting into the trial. My head has that floating balloon feeling that signals that I need a shot of coffee and my empty stomach is growling audibly and what I really want to ask him is if he will save my place while I run across the street to the diner. The Marshall, a taciturn man whose bad luck it apparently had been to have drawn public relations duty on this day, barely looks up from his morning Post to tell me that I shouldn’t have any problem getting in.

Behind me, at the security station near the entrance, an alarm goes off. The Marshall looks up sharply at the noise and I follow his gaze to a large, beefy guy dressed in an Armani sportcoat and sporting a Miami Beach tan who is standing next to the metal detector, surrounded by three very interested Feds. The guy has already emptied his pockets of a silver cigarette case and lighter, a set of keys and some loose change. He shrugs and pulls his pants pockets inside-out to show that they are empty. One of the feds asks him if he's carrying and the guy sort of snorts and says 'Yeah, right' but apparently he knows the drill, for he lifts his arms up a bit while another fed pats him down. The guy comes up clean. The first Marshall gives him the once over with the wand and it turns out that the offending piece of metal is simply the guy's belt. Those Gucci buckles do make quite an impression. They let the guy past and wave someone else through the machine. The alarm goes off again. Christ, I think, they must have that thing set to pick up paper clips.

The sounds emanating from my gut cause me to turn my attention back to the Marshall behind the desk. He is still taking in the mini-drama of the security station, with what seems to me to be a look of envy. I get the distinct impression that he regards his present assignment as somehow beneath his training as a federal law enforcement officer. I look up at the clock. Eight thirty-seven. My stomach rumbles again. I finally ask the Marshall whether he thinks I have time to run across the street for something to eat.

He tells me that I shouldn’t have any problem, answering in the same matter-of-fact, distracted tone as before, the subtext of which is clearly translates as “I could give a fuck.” I decide to chance it and go for the coffee and food. I'm no good in this condition anyway, with only five hours of sleep the night before. I leave the courthouse and head out across the park at Cadman Plaza.

Six months before I had quit my job as a prosecutor with the Brooklyn DA's office and had taken a part-time job with an attorney in Manhattan so that I could spend more time on my writing. The money that the civil attorney was paying me was decent enough but I worried that it might not be steady. A couple of my colleagues had told me that I could apply to get certified by the Bar to do assigned counsel work for indigent defendants. The money wasn't great but I didn't know how long the job with the civil attorney would last. Besides, I missed Brooklyn and the drama and grit of doing criminal law work. So I had scheduled an interview with the assigned counsel panel for later that afternoon on Remsen Street, was dressed respectably enough for the occasion and was carrying my briefcase. For all the world I looked like any other Brooklyn criminal defense lawyer. Now if I could just wake up, I might be able to start thinking like one as well.

At a diner across Cadman Plaza from the courthouse I order a coffee and an egg-and-ham-on-roll to go. The crowd at this hour is what you'd expect, mostly: lawyers and judges from the various courts nearby, post office workers from the old Brooklyn Central Post Office, a few neighborhood people. But at a table near the back of the diner are seated six men who are quite a different crowd from the coffee klatch of civil service regulars and Court Street lawyers. I realize that most of their faces are familiar to me from the surveillance photos and mug shots that hung on the wall of the DI Squad Room in the Rackets Bureau of my old office. Seated around this table are Jack D'Amico (“Jackie Nose”), John's brother Peter (Pete) Gotti, John Gotti fils (“Junior”), Dominick Burgese (“Fat Dom”), John Giordano (“Good Looking Jackie”) and a couple of other goombas whom I don't recognize.

These are the big guns of the Gambino organized crime family, Gotti's trusted adjutants, minus one. Up close and in person they look even more idiosyncratic than in their photos, like characters from a different time, a forties gangster movie maybe. While I wait for my order to be filled I observe the crew. The big men sit at their table quietly, hardly talking, munching their coffee and danish with melancholy looks on their faces. It occurs to me that these guys are like the dinosaurs at time the world's climate changed. Something equally fundamental in their world had changed and I wondered if they knew it. Gravano will ultimately end up burying Gotti and Locasio, will rend apart the intimate dysfunctional family whose members are breakfasting here, will, in fact, change forever their way of life. But that final act of betrayal, Gravano’s testimony before the federal jury across the street, was, on this morning, still only a threat the implications of which were far from clear.

I leave the diner and walk back across Cadman Plaza Park to the courthouse. By now a couple of TV news trucks have arrived and are setting up, their antennae extended and the on-air talent practicing their stand-ups, hoping for a good sound bite from Albert Kreiger or Tony Cardinale, the defense lawyers that Gotti and Locascio had retained after Bruce Cutler had been cut from the case, or from Cutler himself, who was expected to make an appearance on the public side of the bar to show his support for his erstwhile client.

Cutler, a well-respected former prosecutor at my old office could, like a lot of men who had grown up with the Godfather movies, recite entire paragraphs of dialogue from them by heart. After leaving the District Attorney’s Office he had gone to work for a small firm in lower Manhattan specializing in criminal law. It was there that he had first started to work for John Gotti. Client and attorney had taken to each other, and soon Gotti had dropped the law firm and retained only the young associate. Cutler’s defense of Gotti, both in court and in the media, was both zealous and effective. Perhaps too effective for his own good, for the feds had successfully charged that Cutler had “crossed the line” and become “house counsel” to the Gambino family, resulting in his being dismissed from representing Gotti in the case. At the time I wondered whether Cutler hadn’t fancied himself to be Gotti’s consigliere, rather like Robert Duvall’s character had been for Brando’s Don Corleone in The Godfather, except that Cutler was a Jewish outsider rather than an Irish one, and except that rather than a behind-the-scenes fixer for a fictional mob boss who preferred to work quietly, Cutler was an in-your-face bulldog for a real mob boss who craved publicity.

I arrive back to the courthouse to find that the line of people standing behind the Marshall's desk has completely disappeared. In its place now stands revealed a line of folding chairs along the wall, all of which are empty except for the first two. I walk up to the Marshall's desk, incredulous, and ask him what happened to the line. He tells me that they've let in as many people as they have room for during the morning session. He invites me to take a seat. I am annoyed at the Marshall for his insincere bureaucratic assurances but am even more annoyed at myself for believing him, rather than having asked someone to save my place while I went for coffee. I take the first empty seat, however, and pull out my coffee and my fast cooling egg-and-ham-on-roll.

Next to me are seated two guys in their mid-twenties. They've come well prepared for a wait, with copies of today's News and Post. The first guy has dark hair and is wearing a three-quarter-length black leather coat over a white shirt and silk pants. The second guy has light hair and wears a windbreaker over a T-shirt and light slacks. Both wear what look to be expensive italian shoes and both are clearly Brooklyn boys, from the sound of their accents. Far from being annoyed or impatient, these guys are cutting each other up telling stories and commenting on the news in the paper. More to the point, they're making everybody who walks in the door. A guy comes in the front door accompanied by two other guys, clearly cops of some sort, who each have one hand on each of the guy's arms. The guy in the middle is carrying his sportcoat folded over his hands, which are clasped together in front of him.

“Uh-oh, looks like that guy’s luck ran out,” says the dark-haired guy.

“City cops?” asks Blondie.

“Nah, feds. DEA, I think,” the dark-haired guy says. “Yeah, see that little pin in their coats?” Blondie cranes his neck to look. I do likewise.

“Yeah”, answers Blondie. I see it, too.

“That’s Drug Enforcement. Oh, yeah”, says the dark-haired guy, clearly the more street-wise of the two.

A few minutes later a short, balding man dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase walks up to them. The dark-haired guy gets up and greets him deferentially with a long handshake, and the two of them walk a few feet away and converse out of earshot.

"Who was that?" asks Blondie when the dark-haired guy sits back down again.

"That guy? He's a smart Jew lawyer that Jackie Nose set me up with. Got a robbery dismissed against me in State Court. Didn't even go to trial."

"Oh, yeah?" asks Blondie.

"Yeah. He's a friend of ours" replies the dark-haired guy.

Now I am entirely focused on these guys, wondering what's going to come next. Who are these guys? But they return to reading their papers, and after a few minutes of nothing happening, I decide that its time for me to break the conversational ice.

"Man, I hope we get in," I venture, to both of them.

"We should", replies Blondie, who is sitting next to me. "The Marshall told us that they'd let us in as soon as somebody leaves the courtroom."

"Yeah, he told me that, too," I reply, and I find my vowels lengthening, my dialect sliding into deep Brooklyn. It's that thing that always happens to me when I want to blend in. There is something of the chameleon in me, the writer-actor who wants to see what it’s like to live in another person's shoes.

"I was here at 8:30, but then I went across the street to get some coffee, and when I got back..."

"Same thing happened to us", Blondie says, "We woulda been here earlier but we stopped for some breakfast along the way. What are you gonna do? You need the coffee, right?"

"You got that right," I say. "I just hope we get in soon. I don't want to be here all day."

"Yeah, me neither," Blondie says, and then leans over to and confides to me -

"We were supposed to get a pass, but I don't think the guy showed up."

A few moments later Blondie asks me if I’m “here for anybody.” I tell him that, no, I'm just here because I wanted to see this for myself.

"You?", I ask him.

"We're here for John," Blondie replies. I just nod.

"What do you think is going to happen? You think he's going to walk?" he asks.

"It all depends on what Gravano does. If he keeps cool on cross, I think he's gonna bury Gotti."

"Ah, Sammy's a rat. Who's gonna believe a rat? The jury ain't gonna believe him when they hear all he's done. What, you a lawyer?"

"Yeah," I answer.

"You a criminal lawyer?"

"Yeah," I answer, after a brief pause. "I used to be a prosecutor, but now I'm doing defense work." What the hell, I figure. It's true enough.

"Hey, Tony," Blondie says to the dark-haired guy, "this guy's a lawyer".

"Oh yeah?" The dark-haired guy answers. We all introduce ourselves and shake hands. The blond guy I've been talking to is named Louie, his dark-haired friend is Tony.

"So, what do you think is gonna happen?" Tony asks me.

"Like I was telling Louie", I say, "I think that it all depends on Gravano, and what Kreiger and Cardinale can do to him on cross, whether they can get him to lose his temper."

"Sammy's a hot-head", Tony says, "he ain't gonna be able to take it."

"I'd agree with you if Cutler was doing the cross. But these other two guys, I don't know. "

"Yeah. Cutler would have Bruce-ified Sammy", Tony says.

"You got a card?" Tony asks, and, with some trepidation, I pull one of my business cards out of its holder and hand it to him. Tony looks at it, pockets it, then turns to Louie and says "You gotta have a good lawyer."

"What time did you guys get here?" I ask.

"Eight forty-five", Tony answers. "Jackie Nose was supposed to get us a pass, but we must have missed him."

"Maybe he ain't even here", Louie says.

"I just saw him a half hour ago", I say, "across the street in the diner."

"What, you saw Jackie Nose? Tony asks.

"Jack D'Amico, yeah, Jackie Nose", I answer. "He was sitting with Pete Gotti, Jackie Giordano, Dom Burgese and some other guys having breakfast. Not forty minutes ago."

"See, I told you he was here," Tony says to Louie, who just shrugs. "I'm gonna go see if I can talk to him, Jackie Nose."

Tony gets up and approaches the Marshall at the desk, who, to my surprise, nods and lets him past.

Louie, who has caught my look, tells me "They'll let him upstairs. They just won't let him in the courtroom. They wanta keep the line down here."

"So how can he talk to Jackie Nose?" I ask.

"Oh, once you're in the courtroom they let you go in and out if you gotta use the can or stretch your legs or something. But you can't get into the courtroom until somebody leaves for good", he says. "We was here all afternoon yesterday and we couldn't get inside", he adds, "but we got here too late. I figure we'll get in today."

I look at the clock. It is now 9:45. It has been almost an hour since the first twenty people were let into the courtroom and no one has come down. Whatever is going on upstairs, it must be pretty interesting. My attention is diverted by the approach of an attractive woman who has walked up to the Marshall's desk. She's in her early twenties, has auburn hair and is well put together in a Fifth Avenue sort of way. The Marshall gestures at our line and she comes over and stands in front of the chair next to mine. She has clearly not anticipated having to wait, and she is trying to decide whether to stay or not. She turns to me and asks me if I've been here a long time. Moderating my dialect back into something approaching my normal manner of speaking, I tell her that I just missed the morning session by five minutes and two people, gesturing at Tony and Louie. Louie, overhearing us, repeats what the Marshall told us and hastens to assure her that, in his opinion, we will be all in the courtroom very soon.

She sits down. We introduce ourselves. Her name is Kimberly and she says she teaches classical piano at a private school in Manhattan. I ask her why she is here and she tells me that she is a friend with one of the witnesses at the trial. At first, this makes no sense to me at all since most of the people testifying at this trial are either wiseguys, or bystanders who saw somebody get whacked by a wiseguy, and since most of these whackings took place in neighborhoods in deep Brooklyn, neighborhoods where Kimberly would stand out like a slice of wonder bread in a loaf of semolina.

It all becomes clear, however, when Kimberly tells me that her friend, Jeffrey, is a writer who was working as a temp at an office near East 46th Street when, one night after he had just left work and was walking down the block in front of Spark's Steakhouse, he saw a car pull up and "some guys on the street" shoot "those guys in a car." "Those guys in the car" were Paul Castellano, the head of the Gambino crime family at the time, and his driver Tony Bilotti, and those "guys on the street" were members of Gotti's crew. Kimberly's friend just happened to witness John Gotti's outrageous power play to seize control of the Gambino family. Evidently Jeffrey was on the stand today, even as we spoke, describing the circumstances of the Castellano killing. Small wonder no one had left the courtroom.

Kimberly also tells me that she knew Jeffrey from college out in Washington State, where she's from, but that she'd lost touch with him since graduating. She didn't know that he was in New York until she had read his name in the paper, and then she had tried to reach him through his parents and that's how she found out that he was in protective police custody. She was worried for him.

Louie has overheard this last bit, for he leans over and asks "Your friend Jeffrey saw that happen, the whacking?" Kimberly replies that he did.

Louie then nudges Tony and repeats this interesting development to him.

"Your friend didn't see that happen" Tony announces, in a tone more dismissive than threatening. But Kimberly is stubborn, if nothing else. "Yes, he did", she maintains.

"Your friend couldna seen that happen," Tony adds. There is a brief pause, and then he asks "Your friend saw that happen? What did he see?"

"I don't know. He saw the guy who shot him, I think."

"He musta seen Sammy do it," Louie says, "cause John wasn't there."

"Nah, John wasn't there," Tony repeats.

"I don't know who he saw. Whoever was there." Kimberly interjects.

"Wow, he saw it, huh?" Tony says, without a trace of belligerence, impressed. "What da ya know?"

The conversation is interrupted by the entrance of a well-dressed couple in their early twenties who, despite having been directed by the Marshall to our seated line, instead take their place, standing, about six feet behind the desk which also happens to be a couple of feet in front of Tony. Tony reaches over and taps the guy's leg.

"Hey, pal," Tony says. The guy turns around and looks down his nose at Tony like he was a bug. "Ya gotta get on line," Tony adds.

"We are on line", the guy replies a voice dripping with condescension.

Tony, who is clearly much smaller than this jerk, doesn't even get up out of his chair. He does it all with his voice. "No. You see these chairs? This is the line. That," he says, pointing to the empty chairs behind Kimberly, "is the end of it."

The yuppie glares at Tony ineffectually. "Come on," the woman says, and pulls the guy over to the line of empty chairs, where they do not sit, but stand at some distance behind Kimberly.

"That guy", Tony says, shaking his head, a bit flustered.

"We been here for over an hour. Where does that guy get off trying to jump the line?" I say, genuinely pissed off.

"Yes, good for you. The nerve of some people," Kimberly pipes in.

"That was very rude" Louie adds.

"I wasn't gonna start anything, but..." Tony says, still shaking his head.

"No, you handled it like a gentleman," Kimberly assures him, and Tony straightens up and brightens as though he had just been paid the greatest complement in the world, which, in his world, he probably has. Then Tony and Louie introduce themselves to Kimberly, all four of us practically best of friends now, after which Tony stands up, shoots his cuffs, says with great dignity "I gotta go take care of my business" and saunters off in the direction of the payphones with coins jangling in his pocket.

Another half-hour goes by in relative quiet. Tony has returned from his errand and is reading Louie's paper. We are all getting restless. Finally, Kimberly gets up. "I don't think I can wait any longer", she says.

Tony, ever the gentleman, stands up and offers to take Kimberly up to the courtroom. "You could write your friend a note, maybe, give it to the Marshall" he suggests. Kimberly takes Tony up on his offer and the two of them leave.

After they are gone I turn to Louie and ask "Tony isn't made or anything, right?" Louie glances around him before replying.

"Nah," he says, making a face which indicates that, in his opinion, this isn't likely to happen, either. "He wants to be. He says they got their eye on him, but..."

His voice trails off, then Louie adds, without a trace of irony, "between you and me, I don't think that there's much of a future in it".

Ten minutes later Tony and Kimberly reappear, their mission having been evidently successfully completed. Kimberly tells me that she gave her note to the Marshall, who told her that he would give it to one of the prosecutors and that she should wait downstairs until the lunch break and maybe she could see Jeffrey then. Tony says that he thinks we'll get in just after lunch, because not everybody will come back. He suggests that maybe we can all four go out to lunch. Kimberly, apparently reassured that she's going to get to see Jeffrey soon, says "Fine". I, however, am not so sure it's such a good idea.

Louie gets up and announces that he's got to go call his boss and tell him that he's not going to be in for work today. This reminds Kimberly that she needs to check her phone machine and the two of them go off together to the payphones.

As soon as they've left, Tony leans over Louie's seat to me and says "Pete, I gotta ask you something."

"Sure. Fire away", I reply.

"Okay. Kimberly and I go upstairs and I bring her over to the Marshall so that she can give him the note, right? And while the Marshall goes to check with somebody Jackie Nose comes up to me and asks me 'Who's the skirt?'"

"Who's the skirt?" I repeat, trying to keep a straight face, beginning to wonder if I haven't fallen into a Cagney-Bogart movie after all.

"Yeah. 'Who's the skirt?" and I told him that she was a friend of Jeffrey's. And he said, 'What, the guy who's testifying today?' and I said 'Yeah, the guy who saw the hit' and he asked me what I knew about her. But before I could say anything more, a buncha Marshalls came over to where Kimberly was standing a few feet away and I couldn't talk to Jackie no more," he tells me.

"Okay", I say, now holding my breath.

"So, Pete, what I want to know is this. Just between you and me, attorney-client privilege, what could happen if I were to find out stuff about Kimberly for Jackie? Could I get in trouble or anything?"

I had started to smile at Tony's naïveté in believing that, simply by my handing him my business card and his muttering the words "attorney-client privilege" he was somehow protected from my disclosing his confidences without first having become my client. My smile, however, faded as I realized what was at stake here. I turned to Tony and told him that under no circumstances should he tell anything more to Jackie Nose, that he could get into very big trouble with the feds if he did so, that he could be charged with tampering with a trial and get sent to federal prison.

Tony looked thoughtful, but uneasy. I had no way of knowing whether he took what I said to heart. So when Kimberly returned a few minutes later I pulled her aside to talk to her.

"Do me a favor," I said, "don't talk to these guys anymore. It's not a good idea."

"Why not? They seem like nice-enough guys."

"Well, maybe they are nice guys, and maybe they aren't. But one thing for sure is they're friends with Gotti's friends, right? And you're friends with Jeffrey, right? And Jeffrey's testifying against Gotti, right? And Gotti and his friends would just as soon that Jeffrey kept his mouth shut, see? And maybe Gotti's friends think if Jeffrey knew that you were in danger then perhaps he would have second thoughts about opening his mouth?"

A slow dawn of understanding breaks over Kimberly's face.

"I thought this only happened in the movies" she says.

Louie, in the meantime, has returned from his errand and, as Kimberly and I turn around, I see that he and Tony are conferring. I'm wondering how much danger Kimberly is really in, who I should contact and how, and whether she'll keep her mouth shut long enough if I were to leave to go find someone who will listen to this strange story. I look over at Tony and he looks back at me, poker faced. As Kimberly and I take our seats again on the line I'm wondering whether my admonition to him has had any effect.

I don't have long to wait to find out. "So, Kimberly, where you from?" Tony starts in with. She looks up at me, worried now.

"The Northwest", she replies.

"What is that, like Nebraska or something?"

"Something like that."

"I thought this only happened in the movies," Kimberly says, more to herself than to anyone else, "I feel like I'm in a movie."

"Huh?" asks Louie.

"I feel like I'm in a movie", she repeats.

"This ain't no movie, Kimberly" Louie says and I feel like shouting at her “LISTEN TO HIM! HE KNOWS WHAT HE'S TALKING ABOUT!” but, of course, I don’t.

Tony picks up where he left off. "So, Kimberly, what do you say? We're having lunch, right? I know this place nearby, they got great pizza. You like pizza?"

"Uhm, I'm not hungry."

"Actually", I butt in, "we already made plans earlier. You guys know how it is."

Just then a cop and a Fed, both in plainclothes, walk up to the line, led by a Marshall. The Marshall points out Kimberly. The Fed and the cop come over, address Kimberly by her last name and ask her if she'll come with them. Kimberly, who by now is more than a little frightened and isn't sure of who to trust, asks them if I can come with her. They nod, assuming that I'm her boyfriend.

The four of us move only a few feet away and the Fed, who turns out to be an FBI agent, tells her that they intercepted her note to Jeffrey and that they would like to arrange to have her meet Jeffrey after the trial. Kimberly says nothing, just looks at me.

"It's OK", I tell her, "they're really cops."

"Who are you, her boyfriend?" asks the FBI agent.

"No. He's a lawyer", says Kimberly.

"He's your lawyer?" asks the City cop, misunderstanding, in a tone that conveys that now he's seen everything. The friends of cooperating witnesses now bring their lawyers to court, for krissakes, to act as go-betweens with the government!

"Uh, it's not like that", I tell them. "Can we go somewhere and talk?" As we are walking away towards the stairs to the offices upstairs, I tell them that I'm a former city prosecutor and throw out the names of a couple of federal prosecutors who I know from my old job, that I don’t have my shield with me right now, but… As with Tony and Louie before, the cops appear to take me on faith. It’s amazing how far the right mannerisms and knowing a few names will take you in this world. As they are leading us out of the lobby I glance over at Tony and Louie, who make a good show of not looking at us.

A few minutes later Kimberly is safely ensconced in a conference room on the second floor of the U.S. Attorney's Office and I am talking outside in the hall to the FBI agent and the detective. The FBI guy, named Greg, is in his thirties. He wears polished wingtips, a conservative gray suit and unstylishly short hair. But for the shoulder holster visible beneath his suit coat when he reaches into his pocket he could pass for a young associate at one of Manhattan’s premier white shoe law firms. The detective, on the other hand, is pure New York cop: in his early fifties, about twenty pounds overweight, in a dark suit that badly needs pressing and shoes which could use a shine. His name is Jimmy Turnbull and he works for the Manhattan South Task Force. I find out later that he caught the case the night of the Castellano-Bilotti hit at Spark's Steakhouse and is one of the few NYPD cops to have ridden the case all the way through to the end. I relate to the two of them the story of Tony and Louie and Jackie Nose's interest in the Skirt.

"Thanks", Turnbull says, smiling, "we'll take care of it." Before they leave they promise to get me into the trial at any time that afternoon, and Turnbull gives me his card and tells me to flash it if anybody at the courthouse gives me any problems. They tell Kimberly that they will bring Jeffrey down to visit her just as soon as he is finished with cross-examination, which they expect will be soon after the afternoon session resumes. This suits Kimberly just fine. She has had her fill of excitement for the day and she's more than happy to stay in the conference room.

I go out to get lunch some lunch for both of us. I have to cross the lobby to get out, and as I do so I see Louie at the head of the line. He waves to me and I walk over.

"Pete," he asks, "you want we should save your place?" I look him in the eyes, but can't detect any guile there.

"Nah", I tell him, looking away, "they're taking care of me".

Louie just nods. I ask him where Tony is and he tells me that he went to get the two of them some lunch.

"See you later", I tell Louie.

"Yeah. See ya upstairs."

By the time I get back from the deli it is past one p.m. and the line in the lobby behind the Marshall's desk has disappeared. I am waived through security as though I worked there and I pass each security checkpoint by flashing Turnbull's card. I go back to the conference room and deliver Kimberly's part of the order and we eat together, talking about music and art and life in Manhattan and how it is so different from the way she thought that it would be from the movies, but how Brooklyn is like something out of a movie after all. After I finish my sandwich I say goodbye to her, tell her that maybe we'll bump into each other in the City, knowing full well that we won't. It is well past 1:30 in the afternoon when I leave her, but I'm not in any hurry because, like Jackie Nose at breakfast this morning, I know that my seat upstairs has been reserved.

When I finally exit onto the fourth floor of the Courthouse I find a wide hallway outside the courtroom half-filled with some of the "friends" and "family" of the defendants, smoking and stretching their legs under the watchful eyes of a half dozen U.S. Marshalls. Much to my surprise, I see Tony and Louie standing next to a velvet rope just the other side of the elevator bank from the direction of the courtroom.

I walk over to them and ask them how come they're not in the courtroom.

"It's full", Tony tells me.

"We gotta wait until someone leaves for good", Louie adds.

"But you guys were first on line," I say. "What happened?"

"Pete, it was like this," Louie says. "Just after Tony got back with the pizza, they told us that they were letting people up two at a time. So Tony and me get into the elevator and we press 'four', only the elevator goes down when it shoulda gone up and we got stuck in the basement for a couple of minutes."

"Yeah," Tony adds, "and by the time we got up here everybody else had already got in and the courtroom was full. So we gotta wait."

"What?" I ask, thinking that this all sounds very unlikely, but that, then again, these guys aren't rocket scientists and maybe they pushed the wrong button. "Ah, man, that's a shame," I say.

"Whataya gonna do?" Louie says, "fuckin' elevator problem."

I enter the double doors of the courtroom, a Marshall at either side, and take a seat among some journalists and spectators. A nervous young man in his mid-twenties is on the stand, undergoing cross-examination by Cardinale. The defense lawyer is trying to challenge Jeffrey's powers of observation and recall, but the kid is sticking to his story, although his voice is a little shakey and it sometimes disappears altogether. Kreiger, meanwhile, is at the defense table with Gotti and Locascio. Every once in a while Gotti leans over to whisper something in Kreiger's ear, then sits back in his chair with a smirk on his face. I look at him closely, nattily attired in an expensive suit, and think that he does dress like a mob boss from a forties gangster movie and wonder whether he didn't get his fashion sense from watching them. Locasio, by contrast, is dressed in a dull blue suit and looks like the middle manager of some automobile factory.

I look around the rest of the courtroom. The front two rows are filled with beefy cops, meant to reassure the reluctant Jeffrey and screen him from the "friends of John" wiseguy visitors. In the front two rows, behind the defense table, I recognize Jack D'Amico, Dom Burgese, Jack Giordano, Pete Gotti, the two other guys from the diner and the guy with the Armani suit and the Miami Beach tan from this morning. There are also a bunch of other guys whom I've never seen before but wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley. I also take note of the number of empty spaces in the benches.

After about forty minutes I get up to leave to make my interview with the assigned counsel panel. Outside of the courtroom, I see Tony and Louie still standing by the velvet rope near the elevators, watched over by a few Marshalls. Jimmy Turnbull stands a discreet distance off. I walk over to Tony and Louie.

"What, you guys still aren't in?" I ask. Tony just shakes his head sadly. "Fuckin' elevator problem", Louie says.

Jimmy Turnbull motions to me to come over and I do. He says he wants to thank me and shakes my hand. I ask him what's the deal with Tony and Louie. Turnbull shrugs his shoulders and says "Whataya gonna do? Fuckin' elevator problem," but gives me a quick wink and a sly smile as he does so and I realize then that Tony and Louie won't be getting into that courtroom at all that day.

As I leave the courthouse I find that I have mixed emotions about my role in what had just happened, and I find that I cannot fully share in the cop's joke. I had come to the courthouse that morning to see for myself the final act in the Gotti drama and had become, in a small way, a bit player in it.

I tell myself that I did the right thing: that I protected someone who may have been in danger and prevented what may have been an attempt to reach a witness. But all the same, I genuinely liked Tony and Louie, they had trusted me and I had betrayed them. And it occurs to me, then, that I have seen far more of their world than I had bargained for when I first made their acquaintance that morning and that this, too, is part of life in Brooklyn at the end of the Gotti era of the Cosa Nostra.

Copyright, 1992 & 2009, by Peter Basta Brightbill

Crossing Fulton Ferry from Fly Market to Iphigenia, suspended in the great grey arms of the Manhattan Bridge. The sun glints off the Harbor, reflecting desire, as the City of Aspiration gathers her breath in anticipation.

"Romance in the Roaring Forties" from " More than Somewhat" (1937) by Damon Runyan

ONLY a rank sucker will think of taking two peeks at Dave the Dude's doll, because while Dave may stand for the first peek, figuring it is a mistake, it is a sure thing he will get sored up at the second peek, and Dave the Dude is certainly not a man to have sored up on you.

But this Waldo Winchester is one hundred percent sucker, which is why he takes quite a number of peeks at Dave's doll And what is more, she takes quite a number of peeks right back at him. And there you are. When a guy and a doll get to taking peeks back and forth at each other, why, there you are indeed.

This Waldo Winchester is a nice-looking young guy who writes pieces about Broadway for the Morning Item. He writes pieces about the goings-on in night clubs, such as fights, and one thing and another, and also about who is running around with who, including guys and dolls.

Sometimes this is very embarrassing to people who may be married and are running around with people who are not married, but of course Waldo Winchester cannot be expected to ask one and all for their marriage certificates before he writes his pieces for the paper.

The chances are if Waldo Winchester knows Miss Billy Perry is Dave the Dude's doll, he will never take more than his first peck at her, but nobody tips him off until after his second or third peek, and by this time Miss Billy Perry is taking her peeks back at , and Waldo Winchester is hooked.

In fact, he is plumb gone, and being a sucker, like I tell you, he does not care whose doll she is* Personally, I do not blame him much, for Miss Billy Perry is worth a few peeks, especially when she is out on the floor of Miss Missouri Martin's Sixteen Hundred Club doing her tap dance. Still, I do not think the best tap-dancer that ever lives can make me take two peeks at her if I know she is Dave the Dude's doll, for Dave somehow thinks more than somewhat of his dolls.

He especially thinks plenty of Miss Billy Perry, and sends her fur coats, and diamond rings, and one thing and another, which she sends back to him at once, because it seems she does not take presents from guys. This is considered most surprising all along Broadway, but people figure the chances are she has some other angle.

Anyway, this does not keep Dave the Dude from liking her just the same, and so she is considered his doll by one and all, and is respected accordingly until this Waldo Winchester comes along.

It happens that he comes along while Dave the Dude is off in the Modoc on a little run down to the Bahamas to get some goods for his business, such as Scotch and champagne, and by the time Dave gets back Miss Billy Perry and Waldo Winchester are at the stage where they sit in corners between her numbers and hold hands.

Of course nobody tells Dave the Dude about this, because they do not wish to get him excited. Not even Miss Missouri Martin tells him, which is most unusual because Miss Missouri Martin, who is sometimes called "Mizzoo" for short, tells everything she knows as soon as she knows it, which is very often before it happens.

You see, the idea is when Dave the Dude is excited he may blow somebody's brains out, and the chances are it will be nobody's brains but Waldo Winchester's, although some claim that Waldo Winchester has no brains or he will not be hanging around Dave the Dude's doll

I know Dave is very, very fond of Miss Billy Perry, because I hear him talk to her several times, and he is most polite to her and never gets out of line in her company by using cuss words, or anything like this. Furthermore, one night when One-eyed Solly Abrahams is a little stewed up he refers to Miss Billy Perry as a broad, meaning no harm whatever, for this is die way many of the toys speak of the dolls.

But right away Dave the Dude reaches across the table and bops One-eyed Solly right in the mouth, so everybody knows from then on that Dave thinks well of Miss Billy Perry. Of course Dave is always thinking fairly well of some doll as far as this goes, but it is seldom he gets to bopping guys in the mouth over them.

Well, one night what happens but Dave the Dude walks into the Sixteen Hundred Club, and there in the entrance, what docs he see but this Waldo Winchester and Miss Billy Perry kissing each other back and forth very friendly. Right away Dave reaches for the old equalizer to shoot Waldo Winchester, but it seems Dave does not happen to have the old equalizer with him, not expecting to have to shoot anybody this particular evening.

So Dave the Dude walks over and as Waldo Winchester hears him coming and lets go his strangle hold on Miss Billy Perry, Dave nails him with a big right hand on the chin. I will say for Dave the Dude that he is a fair puncher with his right hand, though his left is not so good, and he knocks Waldo Winchester bow-legged. In fact, Waldo folds right up on the floor.

Well, Miss Billy Perry lets out a screech you can hear clear to the Battery and runs over to where Waldo Winchester lights, and falls on top of him squalling very loud. All anybody can make out of what she says is that Dave the Dude is a big bum, although Dave is not so big, at that, and that she loves Waldo Winchester.

Dave walks over and starts to give Waldo Winchester the leather, which is considered customary in such cases, but he seems to change his mind, and instead of booting Waldo around, Dave turns and walks out of the joint looking very black and mad, and the next anybody hears of him he is over in the Chicken Club doing plenty of drinking.

This is regarded as a very bad sign indeed, because while everybody goes to the Chicken Club now and then to give Tony Bertazzola, the owner, a friendly play, very few people care to do any drinking there, because Tonys liquor is not meant for anybody to drink except the customers.

Well, Miss Billy Perry gets Waldo Winchester on his pegs again, and wipes his chin off with her handkerchief, and by and by he is all-okay except for a big lump on his chin. And all the time she is telling Waldo Winchester what a big bum Dave the Dude is, although afterwards Miss Missouri Martin gets hold of Miss Billy Perry and puts the blast on her plenty for chasing a two-handed spender such as Dave the Dude out of the joint.

"You are nothing but a little sap," Miss Missouri Martin tells Miss Billy Perry. "You cannot get the right time off this newspaper guy, while everybody knows Dave the Dude is a very fast man with a dollar."

"But I love Mr. Winchester," says Miss Billy Perry. "He is so romantic. He is not a bootlegger and a gunman like Dave the Dude. He puts lovely pieces in the paper about me, and he is a gentleman at all times."

Now of course Miss Missouri Martin is not in a position to argue about gentlemen, because she meets very few in the Sixteen Hundred Club and anyway, she does not wish to make Waldo Winchester mad as he is apt to turn around and put pieces in his paper that will be a knock to the joint, so she lets the matter drop.

Miss Billy Perry and Waldo Winchester go on holding hands between her numbers, and maybe kissing each other now and then, as young people are liable to do, and Dave the Dude plays the chill for the Sixteen Hundred Club and everything seems to be all right. Naturally we are all very glad there is no more trouble over the proposition, because the best Dave can get is the worst of it in a jam with a newspaper guy.

Personally, I figure Dave will soon find himself another doll and forget all about Miss Billy Perry, because now that I take another peek at her, I can see where she is just about the same as any other tap-dancer, except that she is red-headed. Tap-dancers are generally blackheads, but I do not know why.

Moosh, the doorman at the Sixteen Hundred Club, tells me Miss Missouri Martin keeps plugging for Dave the Dude with Miss Billy Perry in a quiet way, because he says he hears Miss Missouri Martin make the following crack one night to her: 'Well, I do not see any Simple Simon on your lean and linger."

This is Miss Missouri Martin's way of saying she sees no diamond on Miss Billy Perry's finger, for Miss Missouri Martin is an old experienced doll, who figures if a guy loves a doll he will prove it with diamonds. Miss Missouri Martin has many diamonds herself, though how any guy can ever get himself heated up enough about Miss Missouri Martin to give her diamonds is more than I can see.

I am not a guy who goes around much, so I do not see Dave the Dude for a couple of weeks, but late one Sunday afternoon little Johnny McGowan, who is one of Dave's men, comes and says to me like this: "What do you think? Dave grabs the scribe a little while ago and is taking him out for an airing!"

Well, Johnny is so excited it is some time before I can get him cooled out enough to explain. It seems that Dave the Dude gets his biggest car out of the garage and sends his driver, Wop Joe, over to the Item office where Waldo Winchester works, with a message that Miss Billy Perry wishes to sec Waldo right away at Miss Missouri Martin's apartment on Fifty-ninth Street.

Of course this message is nothing but the phonus bolonus, but Waldo drops in for it and gets in the car. Then Wop Joe drives him up to Miss Missouri Martin's apartment, and who gets in the car there but Dave the Dude. And away they go.  Now this is very bad news indeed, because when Dave the Dude takes a guy out for an airing the guy very often docs not come back. What happens to him I never ask, because the best a guy can get by asking questions in this man's town is a bust in the nose.

But I am much worried over this proposition, because I like Dave the Dude, and I know that taking a newspaper guy like Waldo Winchester out for an airing is apt to cause talk, especially if he does not come back. The other guys that Dave the Dude takes out for airings do not mean much in particular, but here is a guy who may produce trouble, even if he is a sucker, on account of being connected up with a newspaper.

I know enough about newspapers to know that by and by the editor or somebody will be around wishing to know where Waldo Winchester's pieces about Broadway are, and if there are no pieces from Waldo Winchester, the editor will wish to know why. Finally it will get around to where other people will wish to know, and after a while many people will be running around saying: 'Where is Waldo Winchester?"

And if enough people in this town get to running around saying where is So-and-so, it becomes a great mystery and the news by there is so much heat in town that it is no place for a guy to be.

But what is to be done about this situation I do not know.   Personally, it strikes me as very bad indeed, and while Johnny goes away to do a little telephoning, I am trying to think up some place to go where people will see me, and remember afterwards that I am there in case it is necessary for them to remember.

Finally Johnny comes back, very excited, and says: "Hey, the Dude is up at the Woodcock Inn on the Pelham Parkway, and he is sending out the word for one and all to come at once. Good-time Charley Bernstein just gets the wire and tells me. Something is doing. The rest of the mob are on their way, so let us be moving."

But here is an invitation which does not strike me as a good thing at all. The way I look at it, Dave the Dude is no company for a guy like me at this time. The chances are he either does something to Waldo Winchester already, or is getting ready to do something to him which I wish no part of.

Personally, 1 have nothing against newspaper guys, not even the ones who write pieces about Broadway. If Dave die Dude wishes to do something to Waldo Winchester, all right, but what is the sense of bringing outsiders into it? But the next thing I know, I am in Johnny McGowan's roadster, and he is zipping along very fast indeed, paying practically no attention to traffic lights or any- thing else.

As we go busting out the Concourse, I get to thinking the situation over, and I figure that Dave the Dude probably keeps thinking about Miss Billy Peny, and drinking liquor such as they sell in the Chicken Club, until finally he blows his topper. The way I look at it, only a guy who is off his nut will think of taking a newspaper guy out for an airing over a doll, when dolls are a dime a dozen in this man's town.

Still, I remember reading in the papers about a lot of different guys who are considered very sensible until they get tangled up with a doll, and maybe loving her, and the first thing anybody knows they hop out of windows, or shoot themselves, or some- body else, and I can see where even a guy like Dave the Dude may go daffy over a doll.

I can see that little Johnny McGowan is worried, too, but he does not say much, and we pull up in front of the Woodcock Inn in no time whatever, to find a lot of other cars there ahead of us, some of which I recognize as belonging to different parties.

The Woodcock Inn is what is called a roadhouse, and is run by Big Nig Skolsky, a very nice man indeed, and a friend of everybody's. It stands back a piece off the Pelham Parkway and is a very pleasant place to go to, what with Nig having a good band and a floor show with a lot of fair-looking dolls, and every- thing else a man can wish for a good time. It gets a nice play from nice people, although Nig's liquor is nothing extra.

Personally, I never go there much, because I do not care for roadhouses, but it is a great spot for Dave the Dude when he is pitching parties, or even when he is only drinking single-handed. There is a lot of racket in the joint as we drive up, and who comes out to meet us but Dave the Dude himself with a big hello. His face is very red, and he seems heated up no little, but he does not look like a guy who is meaning any harm to anybody, especially a newspaper guy,

"Come in, guys!" Dave the Dude yells. "Come right in!"

So we go in, and the place is full of people sitting at tables, or out on the floor dancing, and I see Miss Missouri Martin with all her diamonds hanging from her in different places, and Good- time Charley Bernstein, and Feet Samuels, and Tony Bertazzola, and Skeets Boliver, and Nick the Greek, and Rochester Red, and a lot of other guys and dolls from around and about.

In fact, it looks as if everybody from all the joints on Broadway are present, including Miss Billy Perry, who is all dressed up in white and is lugging a big bundle of orchids and so forth, and who is giggling and smiling and shaking hands and going on generally. And finally I see Waldo Winchester, the scribe, sitting at a ringside table all by himself, but there is nothing wrong with him as far as I can see. I mean, he seems to be all in one piece so far.

"Dave," I say to Dave the Dude, very quiet, "what is coming off here? You know a guy cannot be too careful what he does around this town, and I will hate to see you tangled up in anything right now."

"Why," Dave says, "what are you talking about? Nothing is coming off here but a wedding, and it is going to be the best wedding anybody on Broadway ever sees. We are waiting for the preacher now."

"You mean somebody is going to be married?" I ask, being now somewhat confused.

"Certainly/' Dave the Dude says, "What do you think? What is the idea of a wedding, anyway?"

"Who is going to be married?" I ask,

"Nobody but Billy and the scribe," Dave says. "This is the greatest thing I ever do in my life. I run into Billy the other night and she is crying her eyes out because she loves this scribe and wishes to marry him, but it seems the scribe has nothing he 'can use for money. So I tell Billy to leave it to me, because you know I love her myself so much I wish to see her happy at all times, even if she has to marry to be that way,

"So I frame this wedding party, and after they are married I am going to stake them to a few G's so they can get a good running start," Dave says, "But I do not tell the scribe and I do not let Billy tell him as I wish it to be a big surprise to him. I kidnap him this afternoon and bring him out here and he is scared half to death thinking I am going to scrag him,

"In fact," Dave says, "I never see a guy so scared. He is still so scared nothing seems to cheer him up. Go over and tell him to shake himself together, because nothing but happiness for him is coming off here."

Well, I wish to say I am greatly relieved to think that Dave intends doing nothing worse to Waldo Winchester than getting him married up, so I go over to where Waldo is sitting. He certainly looks somewhat alarmed. He is all in a huddle with himself, and he has what you call a vacant stare in his eyes. I can see that he is indeed frightened, so I give him a jolly slap on the back and I say: "Congratulations, pal! Cheer up, the worst is yet to come!"

"You bet it is," Waldo Winchester says, his voice so solemn I am greatly surprised. "You are a fine-looking bridegroom," I say. "You look as if you are at a funeral instead of a wedding. Why do you not laugh ha-ha, and maybe take a dram or two and go to cutting up some?"

"Mister," says Waldo Winchester, "my wife is not going to care for me getting married to Miss Billy Perry."

"Your wife?" I say, much astonished, 'What is this you are speaking of? How can you have any wife except Miss Billy Perry? This is great foolishness," "I know' Waldo says, very sad. "I know. But I got a wife just the same, and she is going to be very nervous when she hears about this. My wife is very strict with me. My wife does not allow me to go around marrying people* My wife is Lola Sapola, of the Rolling Sapolas, the acrobats, and I am married to her for five years. She is the strong lady who juggles the other four people in the act. My wife just gets back from a years tour of the Interstate time, and she is at the Marx Hotel right this minute. I am upset by this proposition/'

"Does Miss Billy Perry know about this wife?" I ask.

"No," he says. "No. She thinks I am single-o. "

"But why do you not tell Dave the Dude you are already married when he brings you out here to marry you off to Miss Billy Perry?" I ask. "It seems to me a newspaper guy must know it is against the law for a guy to marry several different dolls unless he is a Turk, or some such."

"Well," Waldo says, "if I tell Dave the Dude I am married after taking his doll away from him, I am quite sure Dave will be very much excited, and maybe do something harmful to my health."

Now there is much in what the guy says, to be sure* I am inclined to think, myself, that Dave will be somewhat disturbed when he learns of this situation, especially when Miss Billy Perry starts in being unhappy about it. But what is to be done I do not know, except maybe to let the wedding go on, and then when Waldo is out of reach of Dave, to drop a dime that he is insane, and that the marriage does not count. It is a sure thing I do not wish to be around when Dave the Dude hears Waldo is already married.

I am thinking that maybe I better take it on the lam out of there, when there is a great row at the door and I hear Dave the Dude yelling that the preacher has arrived.  He is a very nice-looking preacher, at that, though he seems somewhat surprised by the goings-on, especially when Miss Missouri Martin steps up and takes charge of him. Miss Missouri Martin tells him she is fond of preachers, and is quite used to them, because she is twice married by preachers, and twice by justices of the peace, and. once by a ship's captain at sea.

By this time one and all present, except maybe myself and Waldo Winchester, and the preacher and maybe Miss Billy Perry, are somewhat corned, Waldo is still sitting at his table looking very sad and saying "Yes" and "No" to Miss Billy Perry whenever she skips past him, for Miss Billy Perry is too much pleasured up with happiness to stay long in one spot.

Dave the Dude is more corned than anybody else, because he has two or three days' running start on everybody. And when Dave the Dude is corned I wish to say that he is a very unreliable guy as to temper, and he is apt to explode right in your face any minute. But he seems to be getting a great bang out of the doings.

Well, by and by Nig Skolsky has the dance floor cleared, and then he moves out on the floor a sort of arch of very beautiful flowers. The idea seems to be that Miss Billy Perry and Waldo Winchester are to be married under this arch. I can see that Dave the Dude must put in several days planning this whole proposition, and it must cost him plenty of the old do-re-mi, especially as I see him showing Miss Missouri Martin a diamond ring as big as a cough drop.

"It is for the bride," Dave the Dude says. "The poor loogan she is marrying will never have enough dough to buy her such a rock, and she always wishes a big one. I get it off a guy who brings it in from Los Angeles. I am going to give the bride away myself in person, so how do I act, Mizzoo? I want Billy to have everything according to the book."

Well, while Miss Missouri Martin is trying to remember back to one of her weddings to tell him, I take another peek at Waldo Winchester to sec how he is making out, I once see two guys go to the old warm squativoo up in Sing Sing, and I wish to say both are laughing heartily compared to Waldo Winchester at this moment.

Miss Billy Perry is sitting with him and the orchestra leader is calling his men dirty names because none of them can think of how "Oh, Promise Me" goes, when Dave the Dude yells: 'Well, we are all set! Let the happy couple step forward!"

Miss Billy Perry bounces up and grabs Waldo Winchester by the arm and pulls him up out of his chair. After a peek at his face I am willing to lay six to five he does not make the arch. But he finally gets there with everybody laughing and clapping their hands, and the preacher comes forward, and Dave the Dude looks happier than I ever see him look before in his life as they all get together under the arch of flowers.

Well, all of a sudden there is a terrible racket at the front door of the Woodcock Inn, with some doll doing a lot of hollering in a deep voice that sounds like a man's, and naturally everybody turns and looks that way. The doorman, a guy by the name of Slugsy Sachs, who is a very hard man indeed, seems to be trying to keep somebody out, but pretty soon there is a heavy bump and Slugsy Sachs falls down, and in comes a doll about four feet high and five feet wide.

In fact, I never see such a wide doll. She looks all hammered down. Her face is almost as wide as her shoulders, and makes me think of a great big full moon. She comes in bounding-like, and I can see that she is all churned up about something. As she bounces in, I hear a gurgle, and I look around to see Waldo Winchester slumping down to the floor, almost dragging Miss Billy Perry with him.

Well, the wide doll walks right up to the bunch under the arch and says in a large bass voice: 'Which one is Dave the Dude?"

"I am Dave the Dude," says Dave the Dude, stepping up, "What do you mean by busting in here like a walrus and gumming up our wedding?"

"So you are the guy who kidnaps my ever-loving husband to marry him off to this little red-headed pancake here, are you?" the wide doll says, looking at Dave the Dude, but pointing at Miss Billy Perry.

Well, now, calling Miss Billy Perry a pancake to Dave the Dude is a very serious proposition, and Dave the Dude gets very angry. He is usually rather polite to dolls, but you can see he docs not care for the wide doors manner whatever,

"Say, listen here," Dave the Dude says, "you better take a walk before somebody clips you. You must be drunk," he says. "Or daffy," he says. 'What are you talking about, anyway?"

"You will see what I am talking about," the wide doll yells. "The guy on the floor there is my lawful husband. You probably frighten him to death, the poor dear. You kidnap him to marry this red- headed thing, and I am going to get you arrested as sure as my name is Lola Sapola, you simple-looking tramp!"

Naturally, everybody is greatly horrified at a doll using such language to Dave the Dude, because Dave is known to shoot guys for much less, but instead of doing something to the wide doll at once, Dave says: 'What is this talk I hear? Who is married to who? Get out of here!" Dave says, grabbing the wide doll's arm.

Well, she makes out as if she is going to slap Dave in the face with her left hand, and Dave naturally pulls his kisser out of the way. But instead of doing anything with her left, Lola Sapola suddenly drives her right fist smack-dab into Dave the Dude's stomach, which naturally comes forward as his face goes back.

I wish to say I see many a body punch delivered in my life, but I never see a prettier one than this. What is more, Lola Sapola steps in with the punch, so there is plenty on it.

Now a guy who eats and drinks like Dave the Dude does cannot take them so good in the stomach, so Dave goes "oof" and sits down very hard on the dance floor, and as he is sitting there he is fumbling in his pants pocket for the old equalizer, so everybody around tears for cover except Lola Sapola, and Miss Billy Perry, and Waldo Winchester.

But before he can get his pistol out, Lola Sapola reaches down and grabs Dave by the collar and hoists him to his feet. She lets go her hold on him, leaving Dave standing on his pins but teetering around somewhat, and then she drives her right hand to Dave's stomach a second time.

The punch drops Dave again, and Lola steps up to him as if she is going to give him the foot. But she only gathers up Waldo Winchester from off die floor and slings him across her shoulder like he is a sack of oats, and starts for the door. Dave the Dude sits up on the floor again and by this time he has the old equalizer in his duke,

"Only for me being a gentleman I will fill you full of slugs' he yells.

Lola Sapola never even looks back, because by this time she is petting Waldo Winchester's head and calling him loving names and saying what a shame it is for bad characters like Dave the Dude to be abusing her precious one. It all sounds to me as if Lola Sapola thinks well of Waldo Winchester,

Well, after she gets out of sight, Dave the Dude gets up off the floor and stands there looking at Miss Billy Perry, who is out to break all crying records. The rest of us come out from under cover, including the preacher, and we are wondering how mad Dave the Dude is going to be about the wedding being ruined. But Dave the Dude seems only disappointed and sad.

"Billy" he says to Miss Billy Perry, "I am mighty sorry you do not get your wedding. All I wish for is your happiness, but I do not believe you can ever be happy with this scribe if he also has to have his lion tamer around. As Cupid I am a total bust. This is the only nice thing I ever try to do in my whole life, and it is too bad it does not come off. Maybe if you wait until he can drown her, or something "

"Dave" says Miss Billy Perry, dropping so many tears that she seems to finally wash herself right into Dave the Dude's arms, "I will never, never be happy with such a guy as Waldo Winchester. I can see now you are the only man for me."

'Well, well, well' Dave the Dude says, cheering right up. "Where is the preacher? Bring on the preacher and let us have our wedding anyway."

I see Mr. and Mrs. Dave the Dude the other day, and they seem very happy. But you never can tell about married people, so of course I am never going to let on to Dave the Dude that I am the one who telephones Lola Sapola at the Marx Hotel, because maybe I do not do Dave any too much of a favor, at that.