BESTSELLERS & BEST FRIENDS
My book publishing blog, with murder mysteries woven through it.
If this is your first visit, be sure to start with “1. Let’s do it!”
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I don’t know what’s going on. I’m confused. Randy’s dead. That damn manuscript from decades ago just showed up.
I feel like it’s now, and like it’s then. Like I’m with the living, and with the dead. I don’t deal well with stuff like that. I’m a pretty simple-minded guy.
I’m pulled to go for a walk. Back in time. Back in my life. Back when Randy was very much alive. Before life got so damn complicated. And dangerous.
I walked from our building on 9th and 23rd up to the corner of Lexington and 60th.
To where I first lived in Manhattan. In a fifth-floor walk-up over The Subway Inn.
The place is gone. There’s nothing there but a big hole. I’m heartbroken.
Charlie Ackerman tending bar in 1963. Christie M. Farriella for New York Daily News
The owner of the building and the bar, Charlie Ackerman, opened the Subway Inn in 1937 just after Prohibition ended.
The New York Times perfectly described Charlie as “a man with a reputation as a colorful sourpuss who lived well into his 90s.”
I got the job at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Now I had to find a place to live in New York City.
I looked through the classified ads in the New York Times. And circled one.
Charlie showed me the rear fifth-floor apartment. $250/month. He said, “First person to give me $500 cash gets it. OK, Jeff? And hey, Meyer Lansky’s grandson’s also interested in it. You know who Meyer Lansky is?”
Yep, the top gangster in New York City, but what he had against his grandson that he would want him to live here, had me stumped.
I had a credit card with a $500 limit. I rushed over to a Chemical Bank, grabbed the $500 in cash and ran back to Charlie. The place was mine.
Randy helped me move from Boston. The only truck or car I could find to rent was a 1968 Buick LeSabre. I bought some rope. Grabbed my mattress, desk, and chair and tied those to the roof. Threw my clothes and typewriter in the back seat. And off to Manhattan Randy and I went.
1968 Buick LeSabre
We parked in front of The Subway Inn where there was no parking. The rented car half on the sidewalk, half on the street, drivers screaming and honking at us, we dragged my stuff up to the fifth floor. Randy took a train back to Boston (he moved to New York City a few years later), and I dropped the car off at Hertz.
What a wonderful dump I moved into that day. The street door was stained with piss. The mailboxes and intercom were long ago ripped off the wall. So I had to pick up my mail at the bar on the way home from work.
When getting my mail, I sometimes paused at the bar and thought of who else had also been there. Drunken (and funny as hell) actor Art Carney had his own booth until he got sober in 1974 for the film “Harry and Tonto.” Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio used to drop by after dinner. Yankee Billy Martin and actor Sean Penn popped in. And writers like Jay McInerney and Wendy Wasserstein wrote about the joint. You can find articles about the Subway Inn in The New York Times and The New Yorker.
Carney, Monroe, DiMaggio, Penn, me (in the Wienermobile, on tour for The Hot Dog Cookbook)
DiMaggio is a small world moment for me. On July 17, 1941, in Cleveland, he went hitless, ending his historic 56-game hitting streak. Which was one hit short of him getting the $10,000 promised by Heinz ketchup for his matching the number “57” featured on their labels. I know the feeling, Joe. I had to give up the $10,000 I got for putting my name on a Heinz cookbook. (Don’t recall that tale? See this post.)
Having people visit me was a pain-in-the-ass. I could be buzzed from the street. But there was no intercom to identify who was buzzing, and no way to buzz them in. I’d hear “buzz!” and run down five flights of stairs only to discover some jerk pissing, with his other hand on my bell. So five flights back up. And I was smoking a pack-and-a-half in those days.
The second floor had a ballpoint pen repair shop. In the morning, when the shop opened and I was leaving for work, there’d be 20 or so people lined up. Ballpoint pen repair. Really?
One night, legs suddenly swung down in front of my window. Some guy was hanging off the roof, trying to kick in my window. I grabbed a baseball bat, opened the window and started beating the hell out of the guy’s legs and ankles. He crawled back up on the roof.
It was an old frame building with a first floor packed with drunken smokers (as was my apartment). Down the old wooden steps was the ONLY exit. The possibility of a fire scared the shit out of me. So I again bought rope – two lengths of 100 feet. I tied a knot every three feet in the rope. Then tied the end of each rope to the bedroom radiator. And coiled up both ropes so neatly that a snake charmer would be proud. Bingo! A fire escape for me. And a second fire escape just in case, you know, I got lucky.
Of course, the rope, if used, would rip the skin off one’s hands. So, I found some black leather gloves and bought two pairs just in case, you know, I got lucky. And neatly placed one pair each on the coiled-up ropes, next to the radiator, at the foot of my mattress on the floor.
Sometimes I seemed to be on the verge of getting lucky, but for whatever reason, she’d look at my thoughtful and considerate fire escape, and suddenly have laundry or homework to do.
On one of my two New Year Eves there, Randy and two women he knew came down from Boston and stayed over. They were in town to go to the punk rock club, CBGB. The two women spent what seemed hours getting ready. Just walking around my place half-naked (they had a lot of tattoos which was weird back then), putting on extreme punk make-up.
I didn’t go out that night, I didn’t have much money, and was never into music. And besides, I had saved up to buy a hardcover copy of E. B. White’s Essays. I loved his collection of letters and couldn’t wait to read his essays. Two six-packs, a pack of smokes, and an E. B. White book – I was set.
Very late, maybe around 4:30 a.m., the one woman returned with the supposed drummer from Sid Vicious’ Sex Pistols band.
He pulled down his pants, she got on her knees, and while that was happening, he nodded at me, and said, “What you readin’?”
“E. B. White’s essays,” I said.
“Any good?” he asked.
“They’re wonderful. Especially the essay about the death of a pig.”
“Cool,” he said.
Then the two of them were done. She passed out on the floor.
The drummer and I wished each other a happy new year, and he left. Then I slid a pillow under her head, laid a blanket over her mostly bare body, and read another essay.
The two years at the Subway Inn were sometimes wild, yet they also tamed me. I did really stupid things, but also really wised up. I used up the last of my youthful silliness and fell in love for a lifetime.
Yep, there was a sadness in looking at that big hole on East 60th where The Subway Inn once was.
I mourned. For Charlie, for those crazy years, for so much. But mostly for Randy. I can easily see us double-parked there, hauling everything I owned up those five flights. He was such a good guy.
Tomorrow: The Fatal Manuscript