Grief Street

anybody who’s anyways different from Mr. and Mrs. Purple Mountain Majesty. Yeah, and all of a sudden the citizens got to be calling us little people. Feh! Call me a midget and give me back my goddamn room!”
    By room, Pauly meant his longtime domicile at the demolished Percival Apartments, a casualty of Times Square gone to the Disney dogs. The late Percival—in its final years, the notorious Percival—was the oldest building on Forty-second between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, that celebrated block known as the Deuce. Before long, I expect, even the term Deuce will vanish, as surely as wounded horses are shot, as surely as the wrecking balls knocked down the Percival, killing my boyhood memories and dumping Pauly Kerwin on the street.
    The Percival was born in 1872 as a Catholic school for rich boys. Ten years later it was redesigned—by no less than the legendary firm of McKim, Mead & White—as an elegant hotel for rich bachelors. At the eve of the twentieth century it went through a series of grand restaurant incarnations, the last of which was Murray’s Roman Gardens, with private upstairs dining rooms and pied-à-terres.
    Murray’s gave way to my own 1950s vintage memory of the Percival: Hubert’s Museum by then, a heavenly sprawl of adolescent bad taste for gawking sailors and hooky-playing schoolboys. There was a rumpus room of Skee-Ball and pinball machines, a freak show run by a barker called Karoy ("I'm the man with the i-run tongue!”), and, for the sailors, the French Academy of Medicine-Paris, France. Professor Ray Heckler operated his famous flea circus in a comer of Hubert’s (“If a dog was to walk by, I’d lose my act!”). Once, I saw the legendary world’s champion heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson at Hubert’s, sitting in a chair behind a curtain that lifted for the holders of twenty-five-cent tickets. By the middle 1960s, my own heaven was gone to peep shows (live and video) and the Barracks, a homosexual brothel popular with the military.
    In my truant days, I had no idea that the cramped top floor of the Percival was known to a certain mordantly humored crowd as the Midget Arms. Because the ceilings were quite low up on six, management had always found it difficult to rent out the rooms to normal-size persons—even on an hourly basis to the hot sheet trade. But the sizable community of midgets in the entertainment business in and around old Times Square found these same rooms cozy; quite desirable, too, since life presented them little opportunity of otherwise looking down over people.

    Pauly Kerwin knows where the Percival was, as do some of the other wee troupers declining here and there in the streets, not so we should see them. To all others, the Percival has disappeared. It is now Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum-Wide-hipped tourists flock to the place, after which they grab something to eat a few doors to the east at what in the language of the new Deuce is called a brew parlor. There, the golf polos and madras pants and beaded T-shirts mix with Armani-clad male yuppies well under five foot ten sucking on tall cigars. More casualties: the cigar boys work in the glass-and-chrome office silos of the new Times Square.
    Pauly’s own claim to the show business fraternity, by the way, was his tough-guy supporting role in a movie called Terror in Tinytown, the all-midget cult classic released in 1949. He plays the heavy to this day, not by choice. He scowls, and has taken to wearing a sign on his neck that reads: THERE’S SIXTY MILLION WAYS TO DIE, PICK ONE AND I’LL KILL YOU, ROTTEN MOTHER-FUCKING AMERICA. Considering the personal security needs of a homeless midget, the tough-guy act makes sense; it scares people off by making them believe he is barking nuts. On the other hand, Pauly’s beggar proceeds have taken a resultant nosedive, along with his value to me as a street informer, since people generally do not talk to him anymore.
    “Hock, boyo, how’s it hanging?” Pauly had been scowling and moping outside a freshly opened tourist boutique, shaking his cup for spare change. Calling out to me in that wheezing, catarrh-rustling, old-time skelly voice scattered his Prospects. Pauly only sighed. Then he hopped up and down. Waving his stubby arms, and called again, “Hock, hey— hey!” Like anybody else, I wanted to avoid Pauly. He sensed as much. “Don’t be passing me up! Hey! For the love of God, Hock—talk to me!”
    There was no avoiding the summons. So I had to