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they had their golden mile across the street from the park. And there were no muggers or highwaymen along this golden mile. Not because of the police. Frank Costello lived in the same Art Deco palace as Arthur Neversink, lived there on his short furloughs from jail.
    That building would soon become my second home. On some evenings I was driven directly from Rosenzweig’s Seventh Avenue fortress to the Neversinks on Central Park West; it saved a long trip back to the Bronx. Even when I arrived well after midnight, the Neversinks weren’t asleep. There were dinner parties every evening. The main attraction wasn’t the mob lawyer himself, but Mrs. Neversink. Miranda . She must have been in her mid-thirties at the time. She had sultry gray eyes that seemed to beckon you onto her own private moon. Her hair was slightly unkempt. She always wore a man’s shirt and slacks that had never seen an ironing board.
    She was a patroness of the arts. That might not have impressed most people, but it had a magical soupçon for a boy who studied painting and lived in the shadow of Vincent van Gogh and his avatar from Wyoming, Jackson Pollock. She had plenty of Pollocks on her walls. She’d sat with him at the Cedar Tavern, shared his little cigars, long before he was known. Miranda had given him pocket money, and Arthur had helped him out of legal scrapes, since Pollock constantly got into fights during his Cedar Tavern days, pulling women’s hair, battling with bartenders, as I imagined Van Gogh would have done had he lived in the twentieth century.
    I never saw Pollock at the Neversinks’ dinner parties. I only saw his paintings, with their lashing rhythm, as if colors could cry out—I would close my eyes and crash right into those time bombs on the wall. And then Miranda would pull me right back into her own terrain. Her musk was enough to make me sick with excitement. I was crazy about her men’s shirts. I wish she could have modeled them in Rosenzweig’s catalogues. That Seventh Avenue Dracula would have made a killing.
    Miranda cursed like a longshoreman. It didn’t come from her husband’s gangster clients. It was from having been the companion to a band of rogue painters—Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, Kline—the new gangsters of American art. Her pale eyes would be puffed out whenever I returned from Rosenzweig’s after midnight. She would begin to sway.
    â€œKid, didn’t I see you somewhere?”
    I was bewildered. I thought she hadn’t recognized me in her alcoholic haze. “I go to school with your son,” I said.
    â€œNo, no, not that,” she muttered. “I’ve seen your face—Arthur, isn’t he a handsome boy? My Adonis.”
    She didn’t mean Joey Adonis, Costello’s partner in crime, who was looking after business while Costello was in the clink. She meant that minor god who was born with such hot looks he had to spend half the year with Persephone, queen of the underworld, or he would have been seduced by every goddess in ancient Greece.
    Miranda must have had Persephone’s prescience. A week later I was listed in Rosenzweig’s catalogue as “Adonis.” I had a page to myself, posing in jockey shorts and muscle tee-shirts with a brooding look. It seems Count Dracula had a lucrative sideline as a pornographer and a pimp. He sold shots of me to wealthy war widows, that is, women who had lost their husbands during World War II. He offered me a hundred-dollar bonus if I’d have dinner with one of these war widows.
    I also graduated from the photography studio to the showrooms and the salons, where I could prance around on a platform in my muscle tee-shirt, under the same blinding lights. I wasn’t allowed to wash up or change my clothes after these performances. Rosenzweig would slick back my hair, as if he were grooming a prize pony, and with a plum-colored velvet jacket over my muscle tee-shirt, I would