Pete Hamill - Forever

“Frankie Martinson,” he said. “Wasn’t that the man?”

“That was the man, all right,” Cormac said. “And I remember how you thanked the fella for his cooperation.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus…”

Cormac saw young Tweed step back, gaze down at the man for a moment, then grab his ankles and drag him roughly down the steps and out into the street. Tweed was laughing a deep, excited laugh. Holding each ankle, he swung the boy around, once, twice, three times, and then let him go. The young man sailed a few feet and then skidded through mud and horseshit and was still.

“Now,” Tweed said, turning to Cormac. “I believe I owe you a drink.”

He draped a large hand on Cormac’s shoulder (he was taller than Cormac by at least two inches) and they began moving toward the Bowery. Tweed laughed and said he knew Martinson from the endless arguments between the fire companies. Tweed was with the Big Six on Gouverneur Street. Martinson was a big shot with Engine Company 40, who called themselves the Lady Washingtons after the wife of the first president. Tweed had infuriated the man for arguing against the lunatics among the nativists and then laughing at his stupidity. He laughed harder that night at the memory of the three men laid out in the mud and fog of Grand Street; laughed, and said they should have delivered the wrecked trio to Engine Company 40; laughed, and then asked Cormac for his name. He told him his true name and Tweed said his.

“You’re a good man,” Bill Tweed said. “I think I’ve found a friend.”

Now that Tweed’s life was in ruins, Cormac could trace that friendship through all its labyrinthine ways; through the rise from the firehouse on Cherry Street that gave Tweed life and a sense of power, into politics as it was, not as he wished it could be. Tweed was like all the others in that New York who lived in the worst places or had the wrong names. They wanted some taste of power, to level out the rules of the game, and Cormac felt what they felt, and so did Bill Tweed. You have the banks, they said together, and you have the churches, and you have the mighty sailing fleets, and you have the deeds to land and the finest houses and servants and water; fair enough: But we have the votes.

“I can count,” said Bill Tweed when Cormac asked him one night why he supported the Irish against the Know-Nothings. Then laughed. Then looked down Orange Street and said, “Somebody better fight for the poor bastards.”

Cormac learned a few days after meeting Bill Tweed that the big man was also quite serious about fighting other enemies. The proof was in a brief note in the Herald: the saloon owned by one Francis Martinson, a volunteer fire captain of Little Water Street, had burned to the ground. The cause of the fire was being investigated. After that, Frankie Martinson was said to have moved to Albany. He was never again seen in the Five Points.

“Don’t get mad,” Tweed said one night, in a philosophical mood. “Get even.”

In the years that followed, Cormac often roamed the night town with Tweed, stopping in saloons, listening to the gossip and the jokes, hearing the tales of faction fights and endless schism. Almost always, Tweed was the man who suggested compromise, conciliation, the smooth solution of a decent job. He was big; the most violent men were all small. On these pilgrimages, Cormac tried to remain a shadow, someone who helped watch Bill Tweed’s back but who never stepped forward to insist on his own importance. And he never asked for anything. Not a job. Not a payday. And when Tweed rose and started consolidating his contacts and powers, when he sold the chair-making shop on Cherry Street to become a full-time politician (heavier now, craftier, measuring every uttered word), when he was elected to Congress for a term, Cormac continued asking for nothing.

“Where, for Christ’s sake, do you live?” Tweed asked one night. “I’ve known you for three years and don’t have a clue.”

He insisted on being taken to the flat on Mott Street. Cormac did not say that this was the room where he had tried to write a true novel, and failed, and where he had begun to write dime novels while working days as a laborer. Tweed stepped into the room in a clumsy way, glanced at the stacked books and clothes hanging from pegs, and a trapped look darted through his eyes.

“It’s like a cell,” he said.

Cormac laughed. “Just what I deserve.”

Tweed picked up a sheaf of Cormac’s drawings.

“These are yours?”

“What I do to keep out of a real cell, Bill.”

“They’re very, very good.”

“Thank you.”

“Why don’t you paint? You’d be a bloody good painter.”

“I couldn’t get a chair into this room,” Cormac said, “never mind an easel.”

“Well, get the hell out of here. I can find you a place. We can find one where you don’t even pay rent. Where—”

“Thanks, Bill. This’ll do me fine. Let’s take a walk. Get something to eat. It’s a lovely night.”

“I’m buying,” Tweed said.

Now Luke went to the door in the bedroom, and two more men arrived. Both were dressed in well-cut worsted suits, and they lifted their derbies as they entered. Cormac had met them both. One was a small precise Madison Avenue doctor named Frank Cahill. The other was Billy Edelstein, one of the first of Tweed’s lawyers after the fall, and now surely the last. Edelstein was plumper than Cahill and had a weary sardonic voice.

“A doctor, a lawyer, and me,” Tweed said. “The last living Indian chief.”

They laughed, since both were Tammany loyalists, members of the Society of Saint Tamenend, an Indian chief who had never existed. The Tammany headquarters in Fourteenth Street was known by friends and foes as the Wigwam.

“No law talk tonight, boys,” Tweed said, his face brightening. “No talk about my ailing heart. Just food, boys, and fun.”

“Fair enough,” Cahill said. “But not too much food, Bill.”

They all knew that for Bill Tweed food was fuel, pleasure, and even the producer of meaning. An extravagant meal told Tweed that he existed. He didn’t drink much, except for iced light Rhinelander wine. But in the glory days, he would have six eggs for breakfast with a slab of ham; three steaks for lunch; bowls of soup, loaves of bread, and buckets of butter with every meal. As he grew older and the power came, the appetite did not vanish. He could never name the void that he could not fill and neither could Cormac. He had one wife, eight children, two mistresses, three houses. Enough wasn’t ever enough.

“Sometimes I think this is all there is,” he said with a smile, twelve years after they met, as they settled into an immense platter of chilled oysters. “All the rest might be bullshit.”

Cormac heard that glorious word for the first time in the 1850s, and it came to epitomize for him all of New York’s rough skepticism. It had much greater weight than the word horseshit . Horseshit was flaky and without substance; it dried in the sun and was blown away in a high wind. Preachers were the masters of horseshit. But bullshit was heavier, filled with crude truth, a kind of black cement. The voters knew the difference and they appreciated bullshit when practiced by a master. Any politician who used God in a speech was practicing horseshit. When he talked about building schools, getting water into Chatham Square, or lighting the darkest streets, Bill Tweed was practicing bullshit. If a third of the bullshit actually came into existence, their lives were made better. Tweed, as he moved up in the system, was a master of bullshit.

The world in which he worked his public arts and his private craft had been formed years earlier by a political enemy named Fernando Wood, who would serve as mayor three times. Wood was a genius, the creator of alliances and secret agendas, his system’s machinery based on the understanding that politics was just another profession and the men who practiced it were entitled to rewards. The hard truth was known by all; to think otherwise was horseshit. Wood just didn’t have an idea in his head and made nothing happen.