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couldn’t figure out why Billy was so hot to bet against elephants, but neither could I bet against Billy, for I was his kinsman in more ways than one. Someone once remarked that Billy
had lived a wastrel’s useless life, which struck me as a point of view benightedly shrouded in uplift. I always found this world of Broadway to be the playground of that part of the soul that
is impervious to any form of improvement not associated with chance, and relentlessly hostile to any conventional goad toward success and heaven. I remember years ago standing with Billy and Sport
Schindler as a Fourth of July parade went past Sport’s place on Broadway. A stranger beside us, seeing a Boy Scout troop stepping along, remarked, “What a fine bunch of boys.”
Sport took his cigar out of his mouth to offer his counterpoint: “Another generation of stool pigeons,” he said.
    That was years ago, and now here I was again with Sport and Billy and their friends, and those Scouts had grown up to become the lawyers, bankers, and politicians who had forced Sport to sell
his saloon so they could level the block and transform it into somebody else’s money. The Monte Carlo gaming rooms were gone, another victim of the crackdown: end of the wheel-and-birdcage
era on Broadway; Louie’s pool room was empty, only Louie’s name left on the grimy windows; Red the barber had moved uptown and so you couldn’t even get shaved on the street
anymore; couldn’t buy a deck of cards either, Bill’s Magic Shop having given way to a ladies’ hat store. A ladies’ hat store. Can you believe it, Billy?
    Also Becker’s Tavern had changed hands in the early fifties, and after that nobody paid any attention to the photographic mural behind the bar, mural of two hundred and two shirt-sleeved
men at a 1932 clambake. Nobody worried anymore about pasting stars on the chests of those men after they died, the way old man Becker used to. One by one the stars had gone up on those chests
through the years; then sometimes a star would fall and be carried off by the sweeper. Stars fell and fell, but they didn’t rise anymore, and so now the dead and the quick were a collage of
uncertain fates. Hey, no star on his chest, but ain’t he dead? Who knows? Who gives a goddamn? Put a star on him, why not? Put a star on Becker’s.
    One by one we move along and the club as we know it slowly dissolves, not to be reconstituted. “Broadway never sleeps,” Sport always said, but now it did. It slept in the memories of
people like him and Billy, men who wandered around the old turf as if it wasn’t really old, as if a brand-new crap table might descend from the sky at any minute—and then, to the music
of lightning bolt and thunder clap, the dice would roll again.
    But no. No lightning. No thunder. No dice. Just the memory of time gone, and the vision of the vanishing space where the winners and losers, the grifters and suckers, had so vividly filled the
air with yesterday’s action.
    “They want me to get married,” Billy said to me.
    “Who does?”
    “Peg. The priest. Agnes.”
    “What’s the priest say?”
    “He says we’re givin’ scandal with Agnes livin’ in. She’s been with us a year maybe.”
    “Then you’re already married, basically.”
    “Nah. She’s got her own room. She’s a roomer.”
    “Ah, I get it,” I said.
    “ ‘Doesn’t look moral,’ the priest says.”
    “Well he’s half right, if you worry about that sort of thing.”
    “I don’t worry. They worry.”
    “What’s Peg say?”
    “Peg says she doesn’t give a damn whether I marry the girl or not. But yeah, she wants it too. It’d get the priest off her back.”
    “So get married, then,” I said. “You like the girl?”
    “She’s great, but how the hell can I get married? I’m fifty-one years old and I don’t have a nickel and don’t know where to get one. I scrounge a little, deal now
and then, but I haven’t had steady work since Morty closed the