He’s been raised on wilted cabbage and thin stews, now he has access to a sultan’s feast. Stepping off the trolley he can smell the roasted pigs, the grilled clams coated with butter, the spring chickens, the filet chateaubriands, the pickled walnuts, the Roman punches, and he realizes—he’s been hungry for sixteen years.
No delicacy at Coney Island is so exotic, so addictive, as the recently invented Nathan’s Famous. It’s also called a hot dog. Slicked with mustard, slotted into a billfold of soft white bread, it makes Willie moan with pleasure. Happy can eat five, Eddie can eat seven. There’s no limit to how many Willie can put away.
After gorging themselves, and washing it all down with a few steins of beer, the boys stroll the Boardwalk, trying to catch the eyes of pretty girls. But pretty girls are the one delicacy they can’t have. In 1917 and 1918 pretty girls want soldiers. Even Happy can’t compete with those smart uniforms, those white sailor hats.
Before catching a rattler home Eddie insists that they swing by the Amazing Incubator, the new warming oven for babies that come out half cooked. Eddie likes to press his face to the glass door, wave at the seven or eight newborns on the other side. Look, Sutty, they’re so damn tiny. They’re like little hot dogs.
Don’t eat one by accident, Happy says
Eddie yells through the glass door. Welcome to earth, suckers. The whole thin’s rigged.
SIX
THERE ARE HUNDREDS SPRINKLED THROUGHOUT THE CITY, BUT HAPPY says only two are worth a damn. One under the Brooklyn Bridge, the other on Sands Street, just outside the Navy Yard. Happy prefers the one on Sands. The girls aren’t necessarily prettier, he says. Just more obliging. They work ten-hour shifts, taking on three customers an hour, and more when the fleet is in. He relates this with the admiration and wonder of a staunch capitalist describing Henry Ford’s new assembly line.
Around the time of the Battle of Passchendaele, and the draft riots in Oklahoma, and the mining strikes throughout the West, the boys pay their first visit together to the house on Sands Street. The kitchen is the waiting room. Six men sit around the table, and along the wall, reading newspapers, like men at a barbershop. The boys grab newspapers, take seats near the stove. They blow on their hands. The night is cold.
Willie watches the other men closely. Each time one is summoned it’s the same routine. The man tromps upstairs. Minutes later, through the ceiling, heavy footsteps. Then a female voice. Then muffled laughter. Then bedsprings squeaking. Then a loud grunt, a high trill, a few moments of exhausted silence. Finally a slammed door, footsteps descending, and the man passes through the kitchen, cheeks blazing, a flower in his buttonhole. The flower is complimentary.
When it’s their turn Willie feels panic verging on apoplexy. At the upstairs landing he hesitates. Maybe another time, Happy, I don’t feel so good. My stomach.
Tell her where it hurts, Willie, she’ll kiss it and make it better.
Happy pushes Willie toward a pale blue door at the far end of the hall. Willie knocks lightly.
Come.
He pushes the door in slowly.
Shut the door, honey—there’s a draft in that hall.
He does as he’s told. The room is dim, lit only by a candle lamp. On the edge of a frilly bed sits a girl in a baby pink negligee. Smooth skin, long full hair. Pretty eyes with dark lashes. But she’s missing her right arm.
Lost it when I was six, she says when Willie asks. Fell under a streetcar. That’s how come they call me Wingy.
It must also be the reason she’s on Sands Street. Not many other ways for a one-armed girl in Brooklyn to get by.
Willie puts a fifty-cent piece on the dresser. Wingy rises, drops the baby pink negligee. Smiling, she comes to Willie, helps him undress. She knows it’s his first time. How do you know, Wingy? I just do, darlin. Willie calculates—it must be her hundred and first time. This month. As he stands with his pants bunched around his feet, she kisses his chin, his lips, his big nose. He begins to shake, as if cold, though the room is stifling. The windows are shut tight, fogging. Wingy leads him to the bed. She lies on top of him. She kisses him harder, parts his lips with hers.
He draws back. Half her bottom teeth are missing.
Merchant marine knocked them out, she says. Now no more questions, sugar lump, just you lie back and let Wingy do what Wingy does.
What does Wingy do?
I said no more questions.
Her touch is surprisingly gentle, and skillful, and Willie is quickly aroused. She drags her rich chestnut hair up his chest, across his face, like a fan of feathers. He likes the way it feels, and smells. Her hair soap, Castile maybe, masks the room’s other baked-in scents. Male sweat, old spunk—and Fels?
It struck him when he first walked in, but it didn’t register. Now it registers. Whoever launders Wingy’s bedclothes uses the same detergent as Mother. It’s a common detergent, he shouldn’t be surprised, but it confuses and troubles Willie at a climactic moment of his maturation.
More confusions. Willie thought Eddie could cuss, but Wingy makes Eddie seem a rank amateur. Why is she cussing? Is Willie doing it wrong? How can he be, when he’s not doing anything? He’s pinned on his back, helpless. If anyone should be cussing, it’s him. Wingy’s abundant pubic hair is coarse, nearly metallic, and it chafes and scrapes the tender skin of Willie’s brand-new penis. In and out, up and down, Wingy does her best to pleasure Willie, and Willie appreciates her diligence, but he can’t stop dwelling on the gap between reality and his expectations. This is what makes the world go round? This is what everyone’s so excited about—this? If there’s any pleasure at all in the experience, it’s the relief he feels when it’s over.
Wingy curls against him, commending his stamina. He thanks her, for everything, then gathers his clothes and gives her a ten-cent tip. He doesn’t stick around for the complimentary flower.
Photographer turns down Sands Street. The road is being repaired. He weaves slowly among orange cones, sawhorses. Anywhere along here, Sutton says.
Photographer pulls over, slips the car into park. Ninth floor, he says in an adenoidal voice—ladies’ handbags, men’s socks.
What happened on this corner, Mr. Sutton?
This is where Willie lost his innocence. A house of ill fame. That’s what we called whorehouses back then.
Was she pretty? Photographer asks.
Yeah. She was. Though she had only one arm. They called her Wingy.
Which arm?
Her left.
Why didn’t they call her Lefty?
That would’ve been cruel.
Reporter and Photographer look at each other, look away.
Do you want to step out, Mr. Sutton?
