Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue (3 page)

"Anyone who heard or saw anything last night on Fifth Street announced the police bullhorn. At the corner was Arnie, at home on his wooden pallet, cuddled up with old blankets he was storing for next winter. He wore a woolen beret, which may have been an homage to either Che Guevara or the international brigades of the Spanish Civil War. But the way he wore it combined with his gaunt appearance made it look more like an homage to Field Marshal Montgomery, except that on it he wore a black-and-white pin that said,
VIVA
LA HUELGA!
from a farmworkers' strike twenty years before on the other side of the continent that he had supported by refusing to eat grapes. Technically, Arnie had been boycotting grapes for two decades, though in recent times he would have had few opportunities to eat grapes unless someone threw some in the garbage. Arnie was in a total boycott these days. He bought nothing.
Viva la huelga,
the meaning lost in time, had become his greeting.

"Viva la huelga,
friends," Arnie greeted.

"Viva la huelga
to you, Arnie. What are you reading?" Nathan asked with Sarah above him, leaning forward to view the steep drop down to Arnie.

Arnie turned the thick, curled old paperback to reveal the cover, Dostoyevsky's
The idiot.
Sitting up on one arm, he explained to Nathan, "I found it on Avenue B," as though Dostoyevsky had a special, different meaning when it came from Avenue B. "Do you think there is such a thing as a purely good man?"

"Partially good would be a find, wouldn't it? Here's a question for you, Arnie: Why do we kill mice?"

Arnie looked up with the smile of a man who had just won a contest. "Because we think it is a threat to our property It is all about owning property." He gestured sweepingly around his small wooden pallet stacked with blankets, books, yellowed and wilted copies of the
Times,
the News, the
Post,
a few magazines, and a few cans. "I own no property, I have no home to protect, and I kill nothing," he declared triumphantly

"But what do you do on Saturdays?" Sarah shouted down from above Nathan's head, instantly erasing the victory grin from Arnie's face. Nathan was pleased. He sometimes called Sarah "the Silencer."

"Why Saturdays, sweetie?" Arnie asked.

"Because you can watch television on Saturdays. It's allowed. So what do you do?"

"Hey," said Arnie, "you hear about that guy Rabbinowitz?"

"Eli? The blintzes guy on Houston?"

"They just found him." Arnie stopped and looked awkwardly at Sarah. "On the street. From last night."

"Heart attack?"

"No, somebody did him."

"Geez," said Nathan. "Who?"

"They don't know."

"Geez."

"Geez," Sarah repeated. "How did he get lost?"

Nathan handed a $1 bill down to Arnie. "You ought to lay low today or you will end up questioned by the police."

"They've already stopped by. That one over there."

He pointed at a plainclothes officer, thickset and powerfully built. Why did they have plainclothes policemen? The gray suits they wore were as identifiable as uniforms and too hot for summer weather. At least uniformed patrolmen got a lightweight blue uniform, but there was no summer-weight suit for plainclothesmen. It was the time of year that plainclothesmen were beginning to sweat. But this one was different. He had a summer suit, a vanilla-colored linen. And despite this fine summer wear, he still looked like a cop. Maybe that was why most of them didn't bother about their clothes.

The officer was across the street, questioning the man everyone called Sal A. There were three Sals. They all sold homemade mozzarella and opinions. Sal A was on Avenue A, and he had the smallest shop, furnished with a counter, a cash register, a tub of unsalted mozzarella, a tub of salted mozzarella, a rack of long seeded bread, and a few trays of delicacies he had prepared for the day. Every morning he baked
sfogli-atella,
and Nathan, who loved
sfogliatella,
could smell them from his apartment the instant they came out of the oven, the fine leaves of the pastry turned amber and the hot ricotta cheese inside heaving like lungs. But Nathan, now that he was entering his late thirties, had started noticing changes in his body, including two flabby, rounded bulges above the hips on either side. He would lift up his shirt to stare at them in the mirror, trying to push them back in with his hands. But they would balloon back into position. Sarah, noting the morning ritual, had taken to calling the bulges "Daddy's tellas," and Nathan did not need an explanation. It was short for
sfogliatella.

Besides baking his own
sfogliatella,
Sal A was different from the other two Sals in several other ways. To begin with, his name was Guido, but he called himself Sal when he opened the store because he could see that in this neighborhood Sicilian shops were run by people named Sal. He was soft-spoken and had thick, silver gray hair. The other two Sals always shouted and were desperately and futilely trying to preserve the few remains of their youthful black hair.

But the other two Sals would have said that the important difference was that they were from Palermo, the tough, crime-ridden Sicilian capital, whereas Sal A was from Catania, the tough, crime-ridden Sicilian second city at the foot of a live volcano.

"Hey, Joey."

"Eh, Sal."

"Eh, Joey, you want some mozzarell'?"

"No, gazie, I'm working," Joey, the cop in linen, told Sal A as though there were a specific rule about mozzarella while on duty. In fact, he was saving his appetite for Sal First, who had a bigger shop on First Avenue and whose mother made caponata. In Sal As caponata, the eggplant, olives, and capers were turned dark with a little unsweetened cocoa powder, bitter and intoxicating, like coffee. Sal A always sprinkled chopped almonds on top because their whiteness glowed against the dark vegetables. Sal First said that this way of doing caponata was "Spanish" and would not be acceptable in Palermo. That might have been true because the use of chocolate was from Spain, but Sal First's use of the "S" word as a curse seemed to be implying a distasteful Puerto Ricanness, and that was what tilted Joey Parma toward the First Avenue version. But he did dip two thick fingers into an oily tray of Sal As olives.

"Try one," Sal A said politely as Joey placed the olive in his mouth. "They're oil cured."

"Aw, shit!" A topaz teardrop of olive oil had landed on the lapel of Joey's linen suit.

"Don't worry about it," said Sal.

"Give me a wet towel."

"Don't touch." Sal produced a bottle of talcum powder and dusted the lapel. "Wait five minutes and just dust it off."

"You sure?"

Sal nodded.

"Thank God I didn't wear my Armani."

"You should be careful."

"Sal, did you hear any gunshots or anything last night between ten and eleven?"

"What, are you kidding? Just about every night. It's like Palermo here. But I didn't hear anything special."

Joey, whose family was from Naples so he could ignore the slight against Palermo, wondered what Sal would consider special.

"Sometimes I think it's just firecrackers. But I don't know. You can kill people with firecrackers, too, you know. It's gunpowder."

"Yeah," said Joey. "Give me just a slice of that mozzarell'."

"Sure, Joey." He cut a fat white piece. Joey tilted his head back and lowered it carefully into his mouth. "Yeah, it's good, Sal. But you ought to get some buffalo."

"Yeah, I'll keep them in Tompkins Park. With the hippie dippies."

"Yeah, take care. Ciao."

"Ciao," said Sal A, and even Nathan across the street could see Sal A salute the backside of Officer Joey Parma with his middle finger. "Buffalo," Sal muttered with an expressively quick bend of his elbow.

As Nathan and Sarah approached Tenth Street from the west side of the avenue and Joey Parma was coming up the other side, sweet-faced Ruben was waiting on the corner. He looked down Avenue A and then shouted across Tenth Street,
"jBajando!"
More than a dozen young men along the curbs of Tenth Street suddenly sat down casually on stoops and car fenders.

But Joey turned east and Ruben waved everybody up.

"Whaz up," Ruben said to Nathan with a smile. Nathan did not smile back. "Oh, the stock market's down?" It was some idea the local drug dealers had that if you did not deal drugs, you had investments on Wall Street instead. Those were the two games in New York in the 1980s, and everybody, they reasoned, must be playing one or the other—and some people were playing both.

It was important to Nathan that Ruben smiled and made an effort, because that was showing respect. That was all you needed to get along in the neighborhood.

Walking down this block of Tenth Street—in four-four or cha-cha-cha—a dozen times dealers whispered the word "Smoke?" There might be other reasons for walking down the block, but anyone on Tenth Street who was not a cop was worth a try.

The dealers had been there since the neighborhood became famous in the 1960s. People from all over the city came down by subway, in expensive polished cars that were always parked in garages, and in long white limousines, to do business with the merchants who stood on the street stupidly repeating one word—"Smoke?"

Many of the people on the block were cops—federal agents, city police, special task forces. They hid out in unmarked delivery trucks or delivery trucks with uninspired logos—a printed name such as
BOB'S
BREAD with no picture or slogan.

Somehow Nathan had gotten to the age of fourteen without ever trying drugs. This was not a principled position. He had wanted to try them, but he was afraid of the lean, vicious-looking men who sold them. It was exactly like the way he had longed to have the corrupt worldly experience of one of those plump, oddly dressed women on Eleventh Street. But he was afraid of the men who sold them, too. And at any moment he might run into his father, who did not seem to completely approve of him and was forever wandering the streets, singing Irving Berlin songs. As a child, Nathan thought Harry was checking up on him. Only as an adult did he understand that this local wandering was simply what Harry did. Harry had come to New York not so much to seek his fortune; he came to be lucky He was the lucky New York son of a luckless European family, and he wandered the streets of his neighborhood singing, not checking up on anyone but just waiting for luck to meet him in the street.

Mordy a year younger than Nathan, was not afraid of running into his father, getting caught, being wrong, or anything else. It was not that he was particularly courageous. He simply lacked the valuable sense of danger. He tried a woman on Eleventh Street when Nathan had still not tried anyone. Of course, Mordy, in what was to become a pattern for life, had no money to pay her. At the time Nathan did not appreciate this accomplishment, because he did not know that you always had to pay first. But Mordy, at fourteen, had talked a prostitute into a gift, a moment of whimsy or perhaps a yearning for innocence that earned her a beating that chipped a tooth. And then Nathan, full of envy and resentment, had to get the money and pay it to a fat man with a broken nose—you could almost make out the outline of someone's knuckle in the dent in his nose—so that he would spare Mordy.

Nathan's urge for those women passed without his ever having sampled. He did soon taste the smoke at a party on Rivington Street where they played Motown music—"Sugar Pie, Honeybun," over and over again. The other thing Nathan remembered about that party was that it was the first time he ever heard the term "East Village." Nathan had grown up in a neighborhood called "the Lower East Side." His mother, Ruth, had grown up there when it was just the East Side. Manhattan was getting more and more labels. At this party, as time stood still from his first inhalation of marijuana, he heard someone say, "You know, they are going to start calling this neighborhood 'the East Village.' " The term took hold as predicted, except that it never did include Rivington Street.

For some years after that, Nathan bought his smoke on this block of Tenth Street. A fast $5 bill for a "nickel bag." Mordy was still buying nickel bags. A nickel bag wasn't as big as it used to be. But it didn't need to be. The bags got smaller and smaller, but the smoke got stronger and stronger, and after so many years of smoking, it seemed to take Mordy only an occasional puff or two to maintain himself in a distant and timeless state.

In the 1960s, Nathan, Mordy, and everyone they knew bought smoke on the block. People liked marijuana because time stumbles by goofily—a minute, an hour, an evening—and they all stood on the street letting time escape them. Nathan started wondering what was happening to that time. In fact, he was worrying more and more about time. So he stopped. And now he didn't smile at the pushers. Everyone agreed that if you didn't smoke in the sixties something was wrong with you, but if you still did in the eighties you were just as wrong. The window for drug correctness was small and narrow.

The street pushers also changed. The Puerto Ricans from the other side of First Avenue moved in. Now Dominicans were starting to push out the Puerto Ricans. The Dominicans, not welcomed by the Puerto Ricans, had built their own neighborhood, turning dying Rivington Street into a boulevard of restaurants and grocery stores. The Puerto Ricans complained that these stores kept the entire neighborhood up all night with loud merengue music and that they were all selling crack down there, the new drug that seemed to make people crazy. Some Dominicans may have been selling crack, but there were also a lot selling bananas, cane juice, and coconut ices. The logic-defying Puerto Rican response was that Dominicans wore no socks. Dominicans, they insisted, were uncivilized because they ate bananas and wore no socks.

Crack was showing up near the East River where the Puerto Ricans lived in tall building projects and also in the old tenements where the Jews had left mezuzahs behind. All over the neighborhood, tiny vials with bright plastic covers turned up wedged in the pavement cracks the way until a few years before, syringes and needles used to be found. Neighborhood people, and the police as well, preferred heroin addicts dozing off in St. Mark's or Tompkins Square to wild-eyed, crazed crack-heads. If the drug pushers had kept anesthetizing everyone with marijuana and heroin, their trade might have lasted in the neighborhood indefinitely. But crack was causing trouble. Where these tiny colored caps were found, there were crazy people, robberies, muggings, break-ins.