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Issue 6: November 2006.
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Home > Issue 6: November 2006 > Non-Fiction

Jazz and Cocktails at the Center
of the World
by Kevin P. Keating

-1-

During a short visit to New York City several years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

It happened this way. I was visiting my friends, Kevin and Kathlene, who like thousands of other ambitious twenty-somethings had moved to the city to seek out their fortune, and even though fortune was a little slow in arriving, had in fact been delayed indefinitely, they nevertheless assumed an air of sophistication and decadence. From a distance and in silhouette Kevin and Kathlene looked like those svelte, stiffly posed figures you see in Jazz Age advertisements, all sharp angles and long lines, a man and woman sipping martinis while standing at a penthouse window; a flapper in a sequined dress, a dandy in a tux, templates used by graphic artists who designed the programs for the latest Gershwin or Cole Porter musical. Girl Crazy, Oh, Kay!, Anything Goes. Whenever they were nearby I heard, or at any rate imagined I heard, muted trumpets, saxophones, syncopated rhythms, Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” Ellington at the Cotton Club.

Kevin and Kathlene wore clothes so bright and flamboyant you couldn’t help but stare and wonder what kind of magical land had dreamed up such outlandish attire. Lime green, hot pink, robin’s egg blue, the vivid pastels of the art deco buildings in Miami Beach or the highlighters I sometimes use to grade papers. I always associate highlighters with the drudgery of teaching composition classes, of critiquing bottomless pits of essays written in the pidgin English of undergraduates, but as for Kevin and Kathlene, well, I never associated them with work of any kind. They had the sparkle and panache of happy hour, a raucous party thrown at a lavish East Egg home where guests swam in bathtubs full of gin, and it occurred to me that perhaps the spirits of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had crossed over to this side of paradise and had taken possession of them.

Maybe I got this impression because during my second night in the city my hosts took me to a haunted basement saloon in an old Chelsea hotel, a once swanky address that in recent years had become a cross between a flophouse and a hip mental institution. Our conversation followed the polite path of good friends getting reacquainted after a long absence (“How is work?”, “How is your family?”, and so on), but as midnight rolled around and the straight path started to twist and turn and our little table grew crowded with empty goblets and tumblers, I happened to glance up and noticed that the walls of the bar, covered in red velvet wallpaper, glowed with a supernatural luminosity. Hades had opened its gates, and the shades of men and women, both famous and infamous, now roamed freely through the world. I’m a skeptic by nature and detest most religious sentiment, maybe because it reminds me of those dour Jesuits who used to torment me back in high school with an almost inquisitorial glee (“Conjugate the verb, Mr. Keating. The past perfect tense, if you please”), but that night I found myself trembling with what can only be described as a revelation.

While I sat in silence, mesmerized by the odd characters who haunted the hotel, Kevin and Kathlene whispered to one another, conspired, tried to gauge whether or not I was savvy enough to understand the customs of the big city, and after a brief exchange they agreed on a plan. My first test: go to the bar alone and order a round of drinks.

“Bring back something…interesting,” they said.

I marched bravely into the smoldering furnace light, pushing my way through the packed bodies ringed around the bar, but getting a drink proved to be all but impossible. A hundred people shouted their orders like brokers on the floor of the Stock Exchange. I craned my neck above the crowd, waved my hands, made cryptic gestures with my fingers. After about ten minutes of this nonsense I decided to give up and return to the table in disgrace when, from out of the shimmering blue clouds of menthols and cigars, a man wearing red satin shorts and enormous white wings appeared at my side and, taking me by the hand, guided me through the bedlam.

“New York,” he said with the raspy voice of a lifelong smoker, “is radiant with the spirit. The energy never stops flowing. It’s the poltergeist of American cities, and it can play funny tricks on people.” He rapped on the bar with his knuckles and the bartender turned to look at us. “I believe,” said the angel, “that this young man would like a drink. Go ahead, dear boy. Don’t be shy.”

Flustered, I ordered three beers, my first mistake as I would soon discover, and without thanking my guardian I hurried away. I am no rube, mind you, but I get a little uneasy when a man with wings flutters out of the ether and performs minor miracles. This was 23rd Street after all, not a rain drenched courtyard in some remote Columbian fishing village, and it struck me as unseemly that a character from a Garcia-Marquez story should disrupt the symmetry of a plot I had concocted days, even weeks, before my arrival in New York. I’d been reading The Great Gatsby, marveling at the debauchery and excesses of the culture described in its pages, and I badly wanted to step into some Jazz Age fairytale.

Back at our table Kevin and Kathlene leaned against one another, sturdy supports in their sweet intoxication, but before I could tell them about my little adventure, they looked at the bottles of Miller Lite in my hand and gasped.

“This is New York!” Kathlene cried, obviously scandalized. “You can’t drink beer. You have to order cocktails!”

I blushed, felt naked without a martini in my hand and a monogrammed cigarette case in my pocket. Were people staring? Could everyone tell that my shoes were from a factory outlet in Ohio, my shirt from the Gap? This was terrible, just terrible. To make matters worse, the man with wings sauntered by, brushing my shoulder with an impish purr, and I spilled beer on the toe of one shoe.

“Don’t worry,” said the angel with a wink. “It’s customary that neophytes make libations to the gods. Pour out a little wine in recognition of the higher powers.”

“This isn’t wine, Gabriel,” I informed him, “and I’m an agnostic.”

He pursed his lips and flounced away.

The Fitzgeralds, sensing trouble, suggested we go elsewhere for a drink, to which I readily consented. As we mounted the stairs in search of a new watering hole, I spied a woman, her hair red and wild, screeching with laughter as she climbed atop a bar stool and, using a pair of tweezers, began to groom the angel’s wings.

“God in heaven” cried the angel, “that feels so divine!”

I polished off one of the beers and, letting out an uproarious Cleveland belch, followed the elegant Fitzgeralds into the dazzling New York night.

-2-

In his tome The Sacred and the Profane, anthropologist and professor of religion Mircea Eliade, late of the University of Chicago, argues that throughout history people have imagined that they live in close proximity to an axis mundi, which can be defined as any sacred place—tree, temple, tent on the edge of the terrible desert—that gives suppliants a fixed point of reference and allows them to break away from the mundane experiences of everyday life and, if they dare, commune with the unseen forces that rule the universe. It is here that the shamans and high priests erect their bridges, ladders, totems, towers; a magical edifice that lets them ascend into the heavens or encourages the gods to descend to the profane world where, as avatars, they either bestow their blessings or wreak havoc.

I would argue that for most native New Yorkers, and perhaps for many émigrés as well, Manhattan is the center of the world and each of its glass and steel skyscrapers a cosmic tree where the gods come and go. Everything revolves around the economic and cultural hub of the city, which has no rival anywhere in all creation. New Yorkers can be very Ptolemaic that way. A latter day Copernicus has yet to come along and point his finger to Chicago, London, Paris, Shanghai and demonstrate that New York is merely one of many cultural outposts in an otherwise barbarous and chaotic world.

Even for a staunchly secular individual, New York is an idealized place where one does not participate in the banalities of day-to-day existence. Consciousness takes a radical turn here. Anyone who has walked through Times Square understands immediately that there is something fundamentally different about this place. New Yorkers have long known it, and they want you to know it, too. Bow down and pay homage! Think of the burning bush speaking to Moses: “Remove your shoes, for this is holy ground.” And so it is with New York, forever and always.

Though some people believe that it’s nothing more than a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah, New York City is in fact a sacred space, one vast and gloomy temple to the insatiable god of money in the most economically competitive nation in the world. Men in sober suites of blue and gray rattle off numbers into their cell phones as they pace back and forth on subway platforms. What these numbers mean I do not know since I failed every math class I ever took and find the business section of the newspaper as indecipherable as clay tablets engraved with cuneiform inscriptions. Still, I am savvy enough to realize that New York is a kind of corporate cathedral, that these businessmen and women are the high priests of commerce and that their bureaucratic legalese is liturgical in nature, incantations meant to invoke the gods of junk bonds and blue chips.

I could only observe these arcane rituals from a distance and hope that someone would come along and toss a few coins in my direction, but if I was forced to play the part of the pitiful mendicant, Kevin and Kathlene were idolaters participating in the endless bacchanals of Tribeca and SoHo. They waved their arms, danced and sang, and through a kind of magic they transformed themselves into the very idols they worshipped. Their antics reminded me of Shiva, the many-armed god of the Hindu pantheon, a statuette of which I saw earlier that afternoon in one of the labyrinthine galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In his right hand Shiva holds a drum, representing the beat of time. In his left he holds a flame, representing the destruction of the created world. There are other arms as well, one lifted in a gesture that means “fear not,” while another is lifted to resemble an elephant’s trunk, suggesting that Shiva will be our guide through the dark jungles of existence and temporality.

Kevin and Kathlene had their symbols, too. Standing together, arms entwined, they made an intimidating mythical being. Bottles of booze clinking together as if counting the minutes to last call; cigarettes burning down to the butts, the glowing embers and cascading ash suggesting an end to laughter, the inevitable hangover, lung cancer, an eternal soiree with Saint Peter. We all have an invitation to that party. But Kevin and Kathlene—or was I now looking at F. Scott and Zelda?—had already taken their places among the gods and beckoned me to watch their dance. I was in for a grand demonstration.

-3-

We went from bar to bar, traipsing through the unusually mild night. The ever-present mist and gloom of March had lifted for the moment, and the moon, very small and yellow, drifted above the concrete canyons of the city. At one point we walked under an overpass and went into a warehouse that had been converted into a nightclub. In a back room situated behind the bar, a small group of socialites chatted about secret things I would never be privy to and sipped their drinks with practiced insouciance. Later, much later, at an Irish pub decorated with Guinness ads and sepia tone photos of James Joyce, I got into a heated argument with a man who posed as a Harvard graduate and wanted desperately to become one of the world-weary socialites. His plan was to run for the Senate and court the powerbrokers who controlled corporate behemoths, convincing them to transform his home, Kauai, into a giant amusement park. He made my flesh crawl. I don’t know who started it or why, but somehow we got to shouting about Plato.

Once again I was in need of rescue and Kevin and Kathlene directed me to the street where they hailed a cab. I heard the scuttle of tiny claws along the pavement. The soot-covered buildings pressed in on me. Why, I wondered, had city officials allowed bags of garbage to pile up on the curbs and sidewalks? When you’re drunk, the illusion slips a little and the city doesn’t look quite so grand.

As the cabbie took us back to the Financial District, Kevin sang “The Star Spangled Banner” at the top of his lungs, an understandable sentiment given this high holy day.

I leaned forward to speak to the driver. “Pardon me, sir, where are you from?”

“Pakistan.”

“You’re a Muslim, I take it?”

Kevin and Kathlene stopped giggling and looked at me as though I were deranged.

“Yes, sir, I am Muslim.”

“Been here long? In New York, I mean?”

“Two years.”

“So what do you think of the city? It’s dirty, isn’t it, claustrophobic?”

“Yes,” he said timidly, “it sucks.”

Ah, a Pakistani cab driver who’d mastered American colloquialisms. It sucks, indeed! A native would have taken offense to this kind of talk, but the driver must have pegged me for another tourist, one of millions who’d wandered into this sanctum sanctorum only to find it disappointingly dingy.

“America’s a big bully,” I said, “but pretty soon we’ll be irrelevant. Like Europe. Decadent, lazy, arrogant.” And so on. The usual observations. Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal have always been heroes of mine. But today of all days my words sounded shockingly sacrilegious.

There had been a ceremony earlier that evening, reporters, TV cameras, solemn speeches delivered by duplicitous men with tiny flags pinned to the lapels of their suits. I knew this because before joining my friends at the bar I passed through Washington Square. A crowd had gathered there, hundreds of people standing in silence and staring up at the night sky. I stood with them and watched, wondering what they were up to. Moments later two pillars of light, blue and ghostly, punctured a hole in the heavens. An entire city trying to commune with the higher powers. Maybe they succeeded. The proof seemed to be everywhere. The angel at the bar. The ghosts of the Fitzgeralds. And now Iblis himself tempting me to blaspheme.

The cabby dropped us off at Kathlene’s apartment near Wall Street. Kevin, when he opened the door, toppled out of the cab into the gutter where he remained motionless for a long time, a thin film of intoxication coating his eyes. I went to pay our fare then realized that I had no cash, only plastic. I asked Kathlene for a few dollars, but she’d left her purse at the bar. This didn’t seem to concern her since she had a funny habit of leaving her purse at various bars around town whenever she got a little tipsy.

“I’m afraid we’re a little short,” I told the driver. “Is there an ATM nearby?”

With a sheepish grin, he said, “Do not worry about it. Have a pleasant evening, sir.” He looked like a man who’d known so much trouble that this was hardly something to get upset over, just another ridiculous episode in a life comprised of ridiculous episodes. How he must have reviled us, three drunk and irresponsible Americans, crying poor.

“No, no, just take me to an ATM,” I insisted.

“Good night, sir.”

After he sped away I walked over to the curb and checked on my hosts. Kathlene cradled Kevin’s head in her arms and cooed softly to him as a mother to her child. Somehow, though I don’t exactly remember how, I managed to get them both out of the gutter and up the winding staircase into the apartment where I left them, the ghosts of Fitzgeralds in all their tarnished glory.

-4-

As I walked back to my hotel through the deserted streets of lower Manhattan, I felt like some bumbling character in a Twilight Zone episode, weaving his way through the post-apocalyptic streets of an anonymous city, a man oblivious to the ironic finish that awaited him. I didn’t bother looking at my watch. It was well past three in the morning and that suited me just fine. The ghouls had vanished hours ago. Each morning they came, thousands of them, to crowd around a plywood barrier on Church Street that cordoned them off from the massive pit that just weeks earlier had been overflowing with unfathomable wreckage. They stood shoulder to shoulder behind the planks of wood, peering hungrily through the gaps, trying glimpse one last smoking ember. By now most of the debris had been cleared away, but it didn’t stop them from swarming around the vast perimeter to see what remained of the destruction.

I walked down Rector Street and gazed for a moment at the final resting place of Alexander Hamilton in the small cemetery at Trinity Church. My hotel was on West Street, and as I turned the corner the silence abruptly gave way to the roar of bulldozers and cranes and the shouts of men in hard hats. Here the view was unencumbered, and I walked slowly toward to the opened gates where dump trucks trundled up a ramp out of a pit swirling with gray dust and ash. Trucks descended into the pit and emerged moments later loaded down with nightmarish freight, the last scraps of twisted iron and steel.

It occurred me that this place, surrounded as it was by unspeakable energy, had become the axis mundi, the center of the world, and I recalled how Joseph Campbell, the noted scholar of mythology, had once described all holy sites—the caves of Lascaux, the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, the medieval cathedral at Chartes—as landscapes of the soul. Amidst the thunder of heavy machinery and the smell of diesel exhaust, I trembled at what this new psychic landscape said about the nature of humanity. War lurked on the horizon, but we’d been assured over and over again that our mission, however it may be defined and for whatever purposes, would soon be accomplished. God was on our side, after all.

I walked across the street to my hotel and the doorman looked right past me as though a person standing alone at the edge of that great and infamous void was the most natural thing in the world. I went to my room, a hangover already setting in, but with so much booze in my belly I found it impossible to doze off, and so I went to the mini fridge and uncorked a bottle of something or other and spent another hour gazing out the window, wondering what the Fitzgeralds would have said about these times. We drift on, like boats against the current? Maybe. But let us not forget that the current often sweeps boats out to sea where they are destroyed by the folly of their own crew, like the Pequod with the monomaniacal Ahab at the helm.

I took solace in the fact that despite the suffering and anguish at the center of the world, the auspicious Fitzgeralds continue their cosmic dance, bottles clinking, cigarettes burning, happy participants in the inexorable round of life and death.