Djelloul Marbrook

More than 50 years ago I’d whip my apron off at the cigar store and dash around the corner to bring Mr. Berman his daily egg cream soda and five-dollar Cuban cigar. It was usually 6:30 p.m., just before I was beseiged with newspaper buyers. Mr. Berman sat all day long in a wheelchair in a dark room in Hell’s Kitchen.

I always made his egg cream extra rich, and I pinched his fabulously expensive cigar to make sure it was fresh. This was, after all, the highlight of Mr. Berman’s day. It took me a few weeks to figure out I was the highlight of his day. I talked to him. I ran his clothes down the block to the laundry. He wanted to know what I was studying. Did I like Columbia? I told him it scared me to death. Too bad I didn’t hear myself say it, because in my third year it scared me right out of there.

I still wake up worrying about Mr. Berman. I remember his gloomy room better than I remember my years at Columbia. There was a kind of significance to his routine that I envied. I didn’t have a clue as to what my life was about, but his was about that egg cream soda and green cigar. He didn’t read newspapers. I don’t remember a radio. But he read books, and he wanted to know what I thought, which is more than I could say of myself or my professors.

Selling newspapers and cigars and sodas at 46th Street and Eighth Avenue was the most important job I ever had. Sure, I did okay in the Navy. I did okay in the newspaper industry, too, but I had real responsibilities in that job where Hell’s Kitchen and the Theater District connect. There was Mr. Berman. There was the grumbling bag lady who stopped by around midnight. She knew that as I wheeled my handtruck down from the old Madison Square Garden (inset) I’d stop in at the deli and buy a corned beef sandwich and a root beer for her, and I’d have them in a bag behind me as I stood outside selling 360 Daily News, 340 Mirrors, 50 Times and 40 copies of the late great Herald Tribune.

There were quite a few people like her and Mr. Berman who needed me to be there, and I’ve never been able to rub out the sob in my chest that lodged there when I abandoned them and moved on. There were people who had things to tell me, who needed me to be there to hear them. There were people who just needed me to greet them and sell them a paper. We depended on each other. That’s how New York can be. You can get unspeakably lonely and be dependent on strangers. No job ever felt like a life to me, except that one, working for the Goldberg brothers, those quintessentially decent young men. It could have been any kid standing there selling papers, but I believed it had to be me, and I knew there were others who shared that view. But it didn’t have to be me in the Navy or on all those newspapers. In a way I was always still back there on the corner of 46th and Eighth Avenue, because at that moment in their lives there were all those people who needed me, and I knew it. And I thought about them all day while I tried to smarten up at Columbia.

I never have smartened up, and nobody who ever thanked me for anything meant quite as much as the bag lady who never thanked me. We both knew that sandwich was my duty.

And when I finally broke down at Columbia and couldn’t think my way through it, couldn’t even figure out what to do with my books, I was still okay, still functioning down there in Hell’s Kitchen. I put my books on a bench and left them there at 116th Street. I never looked back. I couldn’t, because I’d abandoned a broken boy, a broken dream, and it was too shameful to contemplate. But I was still okay behind my handtruck, still okay in my blue New York Daily News change apron, still okay listening to whatever all those wounded survivors had to tell me. I didn’t even know I was broken. I didn’t know I’d had what they used to call a nervous breakdown and now call a psychotic break. I just thought I’d dropped the ball and wasn’t bona fide anymore. Still, I had a home, right there on the street. Not my room on 70th and West End Avenue, but right there with all those haunted faces: prize fighters who punched out windshields, Holocaust survivors, pickpockets, thugs, bums, and cracked dropouts like me.

There were celebrities too. Frank Costello gave me a fiver every night for the three-penny News. The breathtaking Gwen Verdon tousled my hair in front of the Garden. Vivian Blaine and Robert Alda shushed up in their limo and gave me a fiver for the Times. Six-foot showgirls blew me kisses. Mike Todd drove me crazy taking his time picking a cigar from the humidor. Joan Diener ( playing Lalume in Kismet) winked at me. Richard Kiley asked me how’s it goin’. Cab Calloway danced a little jig for me when he saw I recognized him. Sugar Ray Robinson drove up in his fuschia pink Cadillac with beautiful girls of every hue and shot me with his forefinger. What the hell did I need to be whole and sane for?

I know there’s something wrong with my clock, always has been. But when I wake up worrying about my friends in Hell’s Kitchen I have to wonder about the nature of time itself. Sure, the mind plays tricks, and I’d write it off as just that if I didn’t know that I’m still living a life in East Anglia in 1946, a very full and detailed life. And then there’s that garden in medieval al-Andalus that I’m always waking up in at dawn among the roses. So what do we know about time? I can’t imagine Mr. Berman not being there. I wonder if anyone can’t imagine me not being there. Or here.

(Note: If I have conveyed any feeling at all for midtown Manhattan in the 1950s you may find it recaptured in my novel, Saraceno, for this is the setting in which I met the novel’s central character, the hit man called Billy Salviati.)