Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue (16 page)

The others at the casita were pleased that Felix had come up with a use for the things that they grew. Most wanted only a few vegetables or flowers to bring home. Panista, a drummer who always tapped nervously, gave snapdragons and tomatoes to Consuela's daughter, Rosita, while he stared irresistibly into her eyes, saying nothing. He knew he did not have a good voice. His strength, he reasoned, was his look. But it made Rosita nervous the way Panista always tapped his fingers. Felix was sure Rosita would be happier with him. They danced well together. Though of course he could not say this, he thought that she danced like a Dominican. She loved the way he danced and told him so.

"Baile' ta' hueno,
Cuquemango."

He was glad she liked it, but first she had to get his name right.
"Felix, por favor. Solo Felix."

Panista, a tall, thin stick of a man called Palo, Chow Mein, and the others at the casita didn't like drug dealers. It was a complicated point of view, because the younger ones like Palo spent the afternoons around the casita listening to
plenas
and smoking what they had bought from Felix. They all believed that the future was not in drugs, but in sushi, for which the price per ounce seemed almost as good. They called Jose Fishman "the only smart dealer on the Loisaida."

The Japanese were coming in. Many kinds of new people were slowly appearing. Property was going to become valuable, and one day some white guy was going to come strolling through the fence gate and the garden and up the wooden steps of the casita to announce that he owned this lot and was selling it to some real estate development corporation. Then they would have no place. Already most Latin people were gone from First and Second avenues. The only
pasteks
on Second Avenue now were sold at Saul Grossman's. Chow Mein insisted that the one hope was that boogaloo would get hot again and he would buy the lot.

"Sushi, sashimi," Panista repeated, tapping out the rhythm of the words.

"Chow Mein could do a Japanese boogaloo," said Felix, "except no one wants boogaloo."

"What's the difference
entre
sushi and sashimi?" asked Panista.

"What difference. No difference
pa'nosotros,"
said Palo.

"No, bro', these guys are smart," said Felix.
"Sabe
how much they charge for
a pedacito de pe' cao."

"Y they don't even have to cook it."

"Sashimi you don't even have to give rice and they charge the same."

"Solounpedacitode
tuna,
nada ma."

"Toro.
I remember that. And wasabi. What's wasabi?"

"Wasabi's not a fish."

"Yeah, it means 'friend' in Indian," said Panista.

Felix charged just enough at his store to make a small profit after the rent. With little overhead, his produce was good and the prices cheap. But he had few customers. It was getting tougher in the neighborhood. He couldn't even open on Tuesdays because there was a farmer's market in front of St. Mark's with good prices for the same things. It was a hot, sunny summer after a good rainy spring, and everyone was going to have nice tomatoes.

For now, Felix could accept that he was not making money the way he had when he was in drugs; although he was barely getting by and didn't want to move down to Rivington Street with the Dominicans, the most painful part was thinking about his mother in their village in the Cibao. When he was dealing, he used to transfer her money every week. She was becoming one of the richest people in the village, and she would just smile coyly and tell the neighbors, "My son Felix is doing very well with the Jews in America." Now he had nothing to send to his mother, and it was not difficult for him to imagine the villagers coming up to her from time to time and asking,
"¿Y cómo van las cosas con tu hijo Felix en Nueba York?"
What's going on with your son Felix in America?

And his mother would answer with a long, solemn sigh of sympathy,
"Nueba York, qué lucha."
What a struggle it is.

But Felix had a plan, to be an American, like the Italians. That was why almost no one in the neighborhood, possibly not even the Chino, was as angry at Cabezucha as Felix.

Cabezucha had gone crazy. He did that. Too much crack and his head became a bomb. He got $200 from the Chino with the laundry. Who would expect to get more from a shop like that? And the Chino saw him, of course, since he stuck the gun in his face and demanded money.

The other dealers didn't like what Cabezucha had done, either. You weren't supposed to remind people that there were guns. You weren't supposed to have any action at all in the territory, you weren't supposed to, as it was always put, "piss in your own bed." It always seemed a strange expression to Felix since he had never heard of anyone pissing in someone else's bed. In the Dominican, you weren't supposed to piss on your own door, which made only slightly more sense.

According to the story that was circulating the neighborhood, Cabezucha was so "ripped" that he did not remember to speak English. But the Chino could guess and handed over what he had in the wooden drawer—$214.37. The Chino was one of several people who saw him try to run into Felix's store. Then the Cuquemango hit him hard in the groin, an easy shot with their height difference, and pushed him out.

Nothing was clear. Maybe he had run there because Felix was involved, but maybe Felix was a hero who had tried to apprehend the thief, or maybe he was involved but then turned against him. But no one even asked Felix what had happened, which proved that the neighborhood saw him as on the other side. Only the cops would talk to him, spreading his legs and slamming him against their car hood, cracking the hard-boiled egg in his hand.

Five blocks to the east, Cabezucha was hiding in the old amphitheater in the park by the river, cooling off, calming down, watching the red tugboats pass under the bridge and the ships tie up at the Domino sugar dock in Brooklyn. He strained to see if they were Dominican boats, but he never spotted a Dominican flag except for the small one he stuck in the broken end of a rusted railing by the steps where he slept. He counted the folded bills in his pocket. Of the $200, there was only $25 left.

"Acht und Zwanzig,"
she heard him puff out as she drew another sip of good sour mash.

"Neun und Zwanzig"
Down he went again, his body straight as a board.

She began to clap. "Bravo, Bernsie.
Dreissig.
The new world record."

Bernhardt Moellen collapsed on the floor of their apartment two floors above the Edelweiss Pastry Shop. "You must admit—" Bernhardt wheezed and coughed and then continued. "Thirty push-ups is not bad for a man of eighty-two."

"Ja,
Bernsie, I will just sit here and sip and not correct you."

"All right, eighty-one." He stood up and walked over to her and kissed her on the forehead. "But it was thirty push-ups." She smiled and took his hand. He studied her face. "You know, I wish you would not let that woman upset you."

"What woman," she said. It was a response—not a question.

"She is completely crazy. From the times. Those times made crazy people. We were the lucky few who could get out with our bodies and minds and—and our honor intact."

"But you know that Viktor will visit us one day"

"Viktor Stein is dead!" Moellen whispered.

"The one really good thing about this country," she said, and she stared into the darker pools of the amber liquid in her glass.

"Yes, good bourbon."

She smiled and shook her head.

"All right, sour something."

"Sour mash, Bernsie."

"I am taking a shower. I have a meeting tonight. That angry man who came in the shop today..."

"I didn't ask."

He clasped her two delicate hands in his large ones. "Hanna, it's about the block."

"I didn't ask what it was about."

"The Chinaman around the corner. He was robbed."

"That's terrible."

"Yes, some of these drug pushers. With a gun. He is very angry. He is right. So we are going to the police again. Get them to do something. What is the name of that man who comes in the shop?"

"Which man?"

"The one with the daughter."

"The one who wanted all the cookies?"

"No, the one who used to be a boy—from the neighborhood. I think Karoline knows him."

"The Jew with the little girl."

"Yes, what's his name? He's always been here. He has a little girl. This is the kind of people who should fight for this neighborhood so it will be decent and safe for children, like it was when we came here with our daughter."

"I don't know his name."

Bernhardt stepped into the shower and Hanna poured some more Jack Daniel's, which is sour mash.

Only a few blocks away, Tom Rosen, a thirty-year-old from the Upper West Side, was having a night in the East Village. He did this more and more often and was thinking of looking for an apartment in the neighborhood. On this evening he decided to try some of the old "ethnic" restaurants that had been featured in that day's
Times.
But it seemed most of them did not take credit cards. Fortunately, he found a cash machine and got $200 out of his bank account in $20 bills that fit inconspicuously in his wallet. You had to be careful down here. He looked around and saw no one who was particularly menacing. But when he turned the corner off the busy avenue onto the quiet street, a very large man with a thick shock of black hair was staring at him wild-eyed, almost as though he had known Tom Rosen was about to turn that corner and he was waiting for him. Rosen, who was athletic and had fast reflexes, pushed the man away, which felt like shoving a wall. The man did not move. Rosen turned to run but realized he was being held by the right arm. The giant looked so confused; he did not seem to realize he was holding him and did not understand why Rosen did not run away Half in anger, half in panic, the large man took out a small handgun, which Rosen could neither reach nor run away from. Rosen struggled. He tried to at least hide his head from the pistol. The more he fought, the angrier the giant became that this man refused to back off. The giant's black-and-red eyes showed a kind of panicky desperation. He fired twice at Rosen's infuriating, bobbing head.

Chow Mein Vega was wide awake in his empty casita, working on his memoirs. On page 583, the boogaloo had still not been invented. Outside were tomatoes and snapdragons, and beyond the fence was the East Village with sirens, and rumbling cars, and people shouting, sometimes in Spanish, and in the distance—a popping noise that caught Chow Mein's attention. He heard it again. Knowing he would be asked, he looked at his watch: 11:53 P.M.

M
IT LIGN KUMT MEN VAYT, OBER NIT TSURIK
," Ruth would say with a pointed index finger and the other hand on her hip, which had gotten a little wide but not too wide for swinging to emphasize the point. With lies you can go far, but there is no going back. Nathan remembered these words as Pepe Le Moko stared at him, the two seated waiting for business in the Meshugaloo Copy Center.

This day, in which Nathan traveled to the edge of madness, began quietly He walked to Tenth Street, and as he opened the loud metal gate of his shop, the little Fat Finkelstein of his generation scurried for the cover of his brownstone. Reasoning that Nathan would seek revenge for the wanton thrust of his tongue at Sarah, the round little boy always hid when he saw Nathan on the block.

Sitting in his shop, Nathan checked the
Times
as the speakers were swooning. The voluptuous strings of the early movements of Beethoven's Ninth were gathering. Five obituaries had been published. All but one, a singer who was hit by a bus—that was what it said, he read it again—were older than him. Good to know.

Nit tsurik,
no going back. The lie was there. It needed no words. Karoline had offered a way back. They would end it and go back to their lives. But he knew that he would be in her bed again. There was no way back. How could this end?

A health columnist in the
Daily News
said that birds carried diseases and that dead bird carcasses could be dangerous to children. Nathan kept Sarah in the neighborhood, which seemed free of bird carcasses, leaving the ancient question Where do birds go when they die? Not to the Lower East Side, in any event. The neighborhood was safe. Pepe rubbed against his ankle in agreement. He could sell out, turn his neighborhood over to some corporation, and get $500,000. Nathan gazed out his window on a busy summer day on Tenth Street. If it were not for his air conditioner allowing him to keep his windows shut, he would not have been able to hear Beethoven over the nervous vendors not only of "smoke," but of dubious watches and rings, a baby crying in fifteen-second blasts with barely a break between, men with carts sifting through trash cans in search of bottles and cans to sell at machines on Fourth Street, some looking for food. A small, bony man kept shouting as he sifted through garbage cans, "I pay my taxes! Goddamn it. I pay!" Even he was careful to stay out of certain garbage cans.

"¡Paga! ¡No paga!
Who needs you!" Carmela was shouting. "Good morning, Nathan," she added, as though she could see him looking through his closed windows. Nathan had to open his door, walk outside, and crane his neck to look up and see her, her fleshy base pushing through the spaces in the fire escape steel.

"Buenos,
Carmela."

"Ay
carajo,
Nathan," she said, staring down. "What kind of trouble are you getting yourself into?" Nathan quickly retreated into his shop, as though to avoid getting caught at something. How did she do that?

Nathan watched the way one dealer would signal Ruben on the corner of First or he would signal one of them. The way at a certain moment one might go to a certain trash can—the garbage can that all the drifters knew not to look for bottles in—or another would reach into the fender of a certain parked car. One even groped under the roots of a thin, struggling tree.

Could he give all this up for half a million dollars? Oh, yes.

Sal First's mother had made
minni di virgini,
which means "virgin breasts" in Sicilian and are little round almond cookies. Sal Eleven, to show that he made them better, also made his own
minni di virgini
and adorned his virgin breasts with candied cherries that made bright red nipples in the center of each cookie. Sal First sneered at this, pointing out that no one in Palermo did such a crude thing. "In Catania, maybe, but not in Palermo." Sal Eleven, who was from Palermo, was told what Sal First had said and, being from Palermo himself, understood the slight of being called Catanian. He dismissed the insult with a wave of his hand. "Can I help it if his virgins don't have nipples?" Sal A, who was from Catania and did not make virgin breasts but recalled that in Catania they did have cherry nipples, laughed at all of this.

But Joey Parma, who was a Neapolitano and did not care about these differences, had noticed that Sal First's mother made a better
minni di virgini
because it was filled with candied squash from Sicily, the long and twisted
cucuzzata
that had been soaked in jasmine petals and water, whereas Sal Eleven had used American yellow summer squash and soaked it in rose petals and water. Later, after he sampled both virgin breasts, Mrs. Moellen at the Edelweiss offered Officer Parma another almond cookie, this time an
Ischler krapferln,
from the Austrian town of Ischl, which was two round, sweet almond cookies filled with raspberry jam and covered with chocolate. Joey thought that while not Italian, this was not bad, either. "Thanks for the
krapferln,"
Officer Parma shouted back to the kitchen as he left.

A police car came down Tenth Street announcing that they were looking for anybody who had seen anything about midnight near Fifth Street.

According to Sal Eleven, a tourist had been shot. "Tourist" meant someone who was not from the neighborhood. Someone had shot him in the head as he left the automatic teller and taken his money. "Just blew up his head and left a mess on the sidewalk. You can still see it!" Sal was telling every customer all day each time with the same shudder of disgust. It was enough of a mess so that it took weeks of summer rain to remove the stain where what was left of Tom Rosen's head had landed on the sidewalk. Everyone in the neighborhood sooner or later found an excuse to walk by Fifth Street and look at the spot.

They all knew that this could have been their blood. The automatic teller, the blown-up head, could anyone doubt that this had been done by the same man who had killed Eli Rabbinowitz? Did he have a motive? Whose head would be shattered next? Without any evidence, most neighborhood people blamed the killing on the drug dealers and were demanding that the police do something. Why was it that drug dealers were never arrested?

Sal First, who saw most things philosophically, explained to Joey Parma, while the officer was crunching his mother's nippleless virgin breasts, "The problem with New Yorkers is that they don't know how to defend themselves anymore. They let themselves get talked out of the right to bore arms. Boring arms is constitutional. I am keeping my handgun. They come, they get it. I'm not prejudiced, you understand. To me it don't make a difference your race, the figmentation of your skin, your credence or religious indoctrination—whatever, I'll blow your fucking head off." Twenty minutes later, he repeated his philosophy almost word for word to Nathan. Nathan gave an ambiguous nod that might pass for agreement. He realized that he had memorized Karoline's phone number and was repeating it in his mind: 674 . . .

The neighborhood committee was meeting with the police at the Boys Club. Who would represent the police? Joey Parma? "Officer Parma," Nathan would say in midmeeting, "do you want to tell us about the wine?" He didn't trust this cop with his wine collection. He did not completely believe Karoline's story. Like Nusan's stories, it seemed to have missing parts.

Nathan could not see from the angle of his shop that Joey Parma at that moment was across the street talking to Felix in his shop. Joey wanted a name. "You've got to give up someone."

"This is an honest store. I sell vegetables," said Felix, methodically massaging a hard-boiled egg with the fingers of his right hand.

"Really?" said Joey, sadistically biting into one of his best tomatoes. But a look of surprise came over his face. "Where do you get these tomatoes?"

"I grow them."

"You're kidding. These are really good. My wife makes bolognese this time of year. How many of these tomatoes can you get me?"

"I don't have much. You've got to pay"

"These tomatoes are so good, I'd even pay for them."

"Okay. I can get you some."

"Aw, shit!" Tomato seeds on the linen lapel. Felix started to rub it off with a wet cloth.

"Don't touch! I'm going to use talcum powder. You have any talcum powder?"

"Talcum powder," said Felix. "That's for grease. Cold water for tomatoes."

"You sure?"

"Trust me, it's my business."

Joey tugged the lapel in Felix's direction, and Felix scrubbed it with the cloth. "I must be nuts. Okay. After the holiday I'll come for the tomatoes. And a name. Come on. Give up somebody. Just one name. And all the tomatoes you've got." He started for the door and then stopped and picked up another tomato and left with it.

It was a customer, a steady client. Felix could see that his store would succeed. And he could show Rosita that it would succeed. Rosita, who would not go out with him because she thought he was a drug dealer—Rosita, who in her purple dress set the whole neighborhood aflame on a summer afternoon, the most beautiful woman in the Loisaida—a competitive title to hold.

But Felix was also worried. He couldn't give anybody up to the police and still stay in the neighborhood. And he had a store now.

Nathan saw Linda Kaplan, mother of Maya. Why wasn't she in Punim County? She was working for Dukakis on Tenth Street. She carried a sign that said DUKAKIS FOR
PRESIDENT
and was passing out buttons that said DUKAKIS. After she left the block, every drug dealer on Tenth Street was sporting, on tank tops, on blue jeans, a DUKAKIS button. Was this good for the campaign? Nathan wondered.

Sal Eleven, staring at his TV and not looking at Nathan, told him to try one. "It's called virgin titty." Looking at the bright red cherry more a stripper's pastie than a virgin's nipple, Nathan would have agreed with the bakers of Palermo. While Nathan sampled, Sal told him about the meeting with the police in the Boys Club. "If you want to know what I think"—there was never a pause after this phrase for a response—"it's bullshit. It's that German guy. I don't know what he's up to."

That was what caught Nathan's interest. What was the German guy up to? In his heart, he agreed with Sal Eleven that the pushers kept away the people who would really destroy the neighborhood, such as the ones who wanted to buy his business. Though to Sal, it was always "the fucking Japanese." Of course, not all the Japanese were Japanese. Some were French and wanted to open little pastry shops. Some, like Ira Katz, were Jewish. They all wanted to buy the neighborhood, to own it, which would destroy everything about it worth having. If the pushers were gone, they would all come in. Only the pushers were stopping them.

But it wasn't going to be Nathan's problem. He was selling. One of them had to leave, him or Karoline.

Nathan had made an appointment with a financial adviser in mid-town, someone who was eager to tell him how to invest $500,000. He could have taken a bus. But he had to know if this disease was still with him, this curse that sucked the breath out of him. He felt confident that it had been only a single claustrophobic incident and was not a permanent condition. But he had to know.

He walked to Astor Place and descended a recently restored subway entrance with its steel-and-glass hood resembling the mouth of a dragon. As he stared down into the darkness, he could feel a vague nervousness, a warning, the early stages of an attack.

He went back up the stairs and walked to Cristofina's botanica.

"I see. A sense of being trapped. Of no way back."

"Yes," said Nathan, "no way back.
Nit tsurik."
Was that it, then? No. The attack had happened before the lie.

"This is psychological," said Cristofina. "It is not a curse. I can't cure it with a powder. I have to give you a sense of a way out. As long as you think there is no way back, no escape, you will feel doomed."

The logic of Cristofina always surprised Nathan. She would be able to solve this.

"¡Siéntete!"
She ordered him to sit on a stool, which she first dusted off with the smack of a newspaper, producing a choking cloud of tan dust. "Yes, I can do it!" she declared.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes,
sin duda. Es obvio, mi amor."

Nathan started feeling better just knowing that there were solutions to problems. He would sell, get money, move uptown where they cleaned the streets and even removed snow in the winter instead of waiting for it to melt—uptown, where bony women looked as though they thought about nothing but clothing, while tired men in careful haircuts thought only about the equation converting energy to money. Nathan's optimism had lasted only an instant.

"What should I do?"

Cristofina stroked her square jaw with her thick fingers as she ex amined the figures and bottles on her shelves. "First, you must get a tattoo."

"A tattoo!"

"Sí,
a little
tattolita."

"Where? I hate tattoos." He thought of Karoline's buttock and realized that this was no longer completely true.

"Escucha', mi amor,
I can only help those who want to be helped. This is very important. A tattoo of an open doorway on your body. You put it somewhere where you can find it when you need it. It will be your doorway."

"No, I can't do that. I don't believe in tattoos."

"Don't believe in them? This isn't about belief This is about practical solutions."

"I'm opposed to them. I don't like them, and they are against my religion."

"Because you are Hebrew."

"I'm a Jew."

"A Jew with a tattoo is better than a tattoo with no Jew."

"Where did you learn that?!"

"It's logic. It is the way the orisha teach."

"Them and my mother."

"Has your mother been cut?"

"Cut?"

"Is she a santera?"

"Just Ashkenazi."

Cristofina took a figure off the shelf, a dull, dark, cast-metal figure of a muscular man pounding an anvil with a hammer. It was a blacksmith, but in a defiant pose, as though he dared commit the outrage of being a blacksmith. Cristofina placed the heavy figure on the counter and began removing a thick layer of gray dust with a duster made of chicken feathers, which had a certain poignancy because Cristofina was known to have killed a considerable quantity of chickens. She looked at the duster. "I should come to your house and kill pigeons in your doorway. It will give you flight."