Book Review : Deadly Game of Survival in the Big City : A Bad Man Is Easy to Find by M. J. Verlaine (St. Martin’s Press: $15.95; 240 pages.)

The title of this short story collection is misleading--as is, if I read correctly--the positioning of the title story and the importance lent to it. These tales aren’t about “bad men,” or about any skirmish or battle or game between the sexes. This game is far more taxing, and the “bad guy” far scarier than any two-timing male, or feckless female. The conflict here is New York City versus Human Beings, and like a game of Monopoly Hell, no one can ever win. Only death or flight will replace a team member: short of World War III, this horrid game will go on forever.

Quickly, let it be said that New York City is not the villain here. It is to the players as a pachinko game might be, full of glittering, falling balls, except that the players are inside the game, flung about and punched and battered: The challenge at the very lowest level is to avoid death by random crime, the break-even point is to survive without going nuts, and a provisional win comes when the city yields up happiness, or fortune, or, of course, love, but since all these can be found in small towns or medium-sized cities like Baltimore or Sacramento, the “center” in this book, New York, offers, uniquely, the promise of the perfect Self, the absolute vocation, the promise of a secular nirvana.

Perhaps a dozen to 20 characters knock across and through these stories, meeting each other by accident or design or answering a personals ad or a job ad. Ruth is scolded by her Jewish grandmother in the title story and advised to find a “good” man. Ruth does, but breaks up a marriage and gets a terminally ill stepson in the process. Cathleen, a pretty actress, is advised repeatedly by her friends that New York survival depends on support systems: “Good friends, great apartment, great job, summer escape place, cab money, deep-pocket plastic, emergency gentlemen willing to escort on short notice, and ambition for the future so it’s worth surviving in the first place.” This is a wonderful list for city survival; what’s missing, of course, is love. Cathleen finds it, unexpectedly.

But many of these stories are about men. In “New York Woman,” a working stiff, Don, described by one Forest Hills girlie as a “Martin Scorsese type,” deplores the money he has to spend on dates and the low level of bimbo he continually ends up with. At his wits’ end, he answers a personal ad in the Village Voice: “Woman offers course in metropolitan style. . . . Free-lance photographer of great sophistication will teach you how to become romantic and suave.” Don learns his lessons well, and the city rewards him beyond his wildest dreams.

But another young man takes on the city with nothing but his charm and his wit for weapons, and comes up a loser: “. . . he was acutely, uncomfortably, wounded-to-the-heart impossibly conscious of every violation of the social contract that he encountered, as if he had seen so much of it that now he could not see anything else.”

This poor guy is getting up the nerve to leave, and wonders “. . . if they get big-city jitters in Boston, New Orleans, Denver . . . they don’t in L.A. Angel City doesn’t have jitters; Angel City has tofu and manana .” A sentence like this, of course, gives pause to the Los Angeles reader. One doesn’t know what is sadder--the application of the same dopey stereotype to our city, which is fast becoming the cocaine capital of the world, or that this collection of stories about Human Beings versus the machinations of the hideous Pachinko City becomes, every day, more relevant to our formerly harmless tofu-metropolis.