The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (27 page)

While a patent remedy called Serutan—“That’s Nature’s backwards!”—was being touted “for the quick relief of the minor aches and pains that come with our high pressure modern life,” the brothers lit joints the size of Phillies panatellas and passed them around. I wonder if Shushan had used to smoke with them: there was so much I did not know. Had my old man smoked with them as well? The idea of my father smoking boo brought a stupid grin to my face as I took a long drag, then passed it to Justo who proceeded to suck a half inch off the joint all by himself. When Cronkite came back he was talking about a presidential trip to Texas. I got up and switched it off. “I sure do want you on my side, gentlemen.”

“Gonna cost,” Royce said.

I looked to Justo. He shrugged. “How can you say that if you don’t know what I need?”

The three brothers grooved on that, nodding their big heads like the bobbing plastic dogs that had begun to appear in the rear windows of American cars. You never saw them in Volkswagens, the only foreign car on the roads. Nor would you ever see a big pair of fuzzy dice hanging in front. Either would block the Beetle’s tiny windows.

“My man, I needs your agreeance first,” Royce said.

There was no need to look to Justo. This was a matter of someone else’s pride. “Royce, whatever you ask, you got it.”

“Mr. Russ, you the right successor of Mr. Shushan,” he said. “That just the way he would do.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m honored.” I was not just saying it.

“Whatever shit you be needing, we be there. Now, you know what we be requiring from you?”

I took the joint as he passed it. “Like I said, you name it.”

“Here what it is,” Royce said. “When this shit, whatever shit come down, be accomplished, you and me and the brothers here we going to introduce you to a little shop on Hundred Twenty-Fifth Street, and we going to buy you a pimp suit to out-pimp all pimp suits. The obscene mama of all pimp suits. And you going to accept it as our gift.”

“That’s what you want?”

“Shee-it, yes.”

“Gentlemen, we got ourselves a deal.”

Between the boo and the
beau geste
, we all broke down in guffaws, and not until the four were almost out the door did we bother to discuss what I needed them for. They didn’t care. Like me, they had agreed before they knew. As he grasped my hand Royce leaned close enough so that I could smell his rum cologne and, my senses heightened by the joint, even the naptholene that had been used to clean the fine wool fabric of his suit.

“Your daddy,” he said. “One time, I was just a kid, he done beat the fecal matter out this sonbitch, not no little mo’fucker neither. Listen up, Mr. Russ. You know why he did that?”

“Tell me.”

“Sonbitch called me nigger,” Royce said, the door closing with a soft click, and leaving me standing there, a bit high, a lot relieved, as though a door had not closed but opened.

Considering that Fritzi, Justo and Terri all considered it imperative I be imprisoned in a hotel suite secured by armed ex-cops below and Ira behind a steel-reinforced door above, the drive out to Brooklyn that evening had all the tension of a day-trip up the Palisades Parkway to Bear Mountain for a bracing summertime swim in a cool lake and a barbecue of chicken and corn. My father had taken me on such a drive once, and having done so must have figured he had provided the complete filial experience and need not repeat it, though the joy of such pleasures is precisely in their repetition. Anyway, it was not daytime but early evening, not summer but late November—though it was so unseasonably warm the top would have been down on the Cadillac were it not for the light rain that had been falling intermittently since morning. Still, there was an air of recreational excitement in the big car, as though we were all going to a party. Perhaps we were.

Sitting between Ira, who drove with his customary dead-pan intensity, as if the road might disappear at any time and he must be prepared to deal with such a void, and Justo, who chain-smoked Old Golds, flicking yet another butt out onto Flatbush Avenue when we came off the Manhattan Bridge as though he were laying a trail of breadcrumbs, I found myself listening with near-manic intensity to the inane lyrics coming over the Caddy’s radio as the ubiquitous disc jockey Allen Freed lay down a line of self-congratulatory patter between songs that forty years later would be called “oldies.” Apparently he was a guest on someone else’s show this evening—having lost his own show in New York the inventor of the phrase “rock and roll” was about to be indicted for taking “payola” to plug records on air—and there was clearly an element of pathos, if not self-pity, in his rich alto as he introduced The Platters singing what was already a classic:

Oh yes I’m the great pretender (ooh ooh)

Pretending I’m doing well (ooh ooh)

My need is such I pretend too much

I’m lonely but no one can tell

Oh yes I’m the great pretender (ooh ooh)

Adrift in a world of my own (ooh ooh)

I play the game but to my real shame

You’ve left me to dream all alone

Too real is this feeling of make believe

Too real when I feel what my heart can’t conceal

Ooh ooh yes I’m the great pretender (ooh ooh)

Just laughing and gay like a clown (ooh ooh)

I seem to be what I’m not (you see)

I’m wearing my heart like a crown

Pretending that you’re still around

From the back seat Detective Kennedy was good enough to offer his services as music critic. Cohen at least had the sense to keep his trap shut. “You’re gonna have to pay us double if you keep playing jigaboo music.”

I turned around. “What?”

“Must be something else on the radio, kid.”

“There is,” I said.

“Jigs is in,” Kennedy said. “All day every day on the news, there they are, marching. What kind of world is that?”

I turned to Justo. “What are we paying them?”

“A C each.”

I turned back. “You want double for having to listen to jig music, is that it? Will it make you feel better if we pay you two hundred?”

“Well, I still won’t love the music but, hey, hardship pay.”

Cohen remained silent.

“Makes sense. Tell me, Kennedy, what’ll you do for
three
hundred?’

“What?”

“Say I give you three hundred. How about that much and The Platters can fuck you up the ass? Will three hundred be enough?”

“Dougie’s just talking,” Cohen said to me, leaning forward. “We worked a long day.”

“Nothing personal, Detective Cohen,” I said. “But shut up.”

“Hey, I didn’t—”

“Shut up,” I said. “Now, Detective Kennedy, have you thought how much you require to be fucked up the ass by the entire membership of The Platters, which let me remind you is four gentlemen of the Negro persuasion plus one lady, who—all things being equal—may demur? Come on, pick a number.”

“I didn’t mean no—”

“A number!”

“Okay, okay,” he said, a reluctant choirboy emerging from deep within the bully. “I’m... sorry.”

“You’re sorry for what?”

“I didn’t mean nothing by it. I can stand the music.”

“You can?”

“Sure. Let’s just pretend it didn’t happen.”

The radio was selling Volkswagen cars. Tiny things, slow and stolid, four could fit into the footprint of Shushan’s Cadillac—my Cadillac, I supposed. The people driving these two cars could have been two different species. From the perspective of many decades, it appears the
Cadillac-Magnons
of the sixties inexplicably died out, replaced by hordes of
Homo Econocar
. In those days driving a Volkswagen—Japanese vehicles were a rare sight even on the West Coast—was still eccentric behavior, like not smoking or drinking in moderation. I suppose Detective Kennedy
had
been drinking, possibly even in moderation for an Irish dick with no one looking over his shoulder. I didn’t care. On my signal Ira pulled over next to a shuttered linoleum emporium that took up most of a block of Flatbush Avenue midway between the Manhattan Bridge and Grand Army Plaza, where a facsimile of the Arc de Triomphe attested to America’s long on-again off-again romance with France, and with civic fickleness. Unlike the one in Paris, Brooklyn’s arch—like the borough in general—was bathed in darkness. Had it been lit other than by the headlights of cars zooming around it, we could have seen it where Ira had stopped a mile or so away from where Flatbush Avenue met Eastern Parkway. That would be the preferred view, because up close we would soon see piles of garbage rotting picturesquely at its base.

“What’s up?” Cohen asked, probably because he knew.

“Pay them off,” I said to Justo, who soundlessly peeled four fifties off a significant roll and passed them back over his head, not looking at the two detectives. “Good night, gentlemen,” I said.

“What good night?” Kennedy asked, having recovered some of his native belligerence. “We ain’t even at the what-do-you-call society, much less providing security.”

“The Bhotke Young Men’s Society,” I said to the windshield. “It’s a club for people with certain values.”

“Sure, sure,” Kennedy said, agreeable.

“That you don’t share,” I said, still looking forward. “So get out of the car.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Newhouse?” Cohen said. “We took your money, we’re up for the job.”

I turned. “Detective, the job was to stand by quietly in case some two-bit hoods like the Tintis try to make trouble for us sometime between when we left the hotel and when we return.”

“That’s right,” Cohen said. “No problem.”

“Yes problem,” I said. “Now take your unquiet friend here and get out of the car. You’re paid off. Leave.”

Ira walked around the car and opened the right-hand door and held it open.

Kennedy would probably die stupid. “What, right in the middle of nigger-heaven? How are we supposed to get out of here?”

For some reason the picture of these two white cops standing hapless in a steady drizzle on a forlorn corner at the edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant, where they had no doubt arrested hundreds, if not thousands, of blacks over a decade and a half, some of them possibly for an actual offense, caused the three of us in the front seat to start giggling like children, first myself, then Justo—as a Puerto Rican he had probably grown up in perpetual fear of the likes of Kennedy and Cohen—and then Ira, who appeared at long last to have a sense of humor, or at least an instinctive comradeship. The giggles turned to laughter, then hooting, and for emphasis Ira leaned on the horn, a monster of an instrument with a deep B-flat tone, and rode it as we circled the arch, a monument to the Union dead of the Civil War, exiting left past the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, built in a proto-fascist style that could have been approved by Mussolini, and then the neo-classical Brooklyn Museum. In both these fine buildings I had passed many quiet afternoons absorbing a wealth of knowledge for which, it was turning out, I had little use.

As we passed the far edge of Prospect Park our laughter subsided sufficiently for me to ask Justo, “How would Shushan have handled that?” In ten blocks or so we would arrive at the Crown Heights Conservatory which two evenings a month sheltered the Bhotke Young Men’s Society. I suppose I needed to hear the bad before I committed worse.

Justo’s left hand came around to my shoulder and gave it an avuncular squeeze. “Same way,” he said. “Same fucking way.”

Apparently I was in the Yiddish papers too—at that time New York had two such dailies, and a number of weeklies. In fact, I was more of a sensation in the Yiddish press than in the English: Nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn makes good in the gangster business—or bad. I should have suspected the scope of my notoriety before I entered the hall, leaving Ira outside the double doors through which Shushan had entered my life only two weeks before. Now, as Justo quietly took a seat in the last row like an impoverished Jew in a strange synagogue, everyone stood as though it really was a synagogue and the Torah scrolls had just been taken out of the ark.

Theoretically I was there to take up my pen as recording secretary, but my entrance caused the kind of uproar even Shushan’s hadn’t. The Bhotke members were workers in the garment center, small tradesmen, shopkeepers, salesmen, tailors, butchers, fish sellers, deli owners, more or less honest business people, with a sprinkling of accountants and dentists and lawyers, even a doctor or two, and they were applauding as if I were Sandy Koufax, another nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn whose bravura pitching had earned him the Most Valuable Player award in the recently concluded World Series, where the (formerly Brooklyn) Dodgers, defected to Los Angeles, had neatly trounced the Yankees in four straight. Hands reached out as I made my way down the center aisle to where Feivel (Franklin) Rubashkin (Robinson) opened his arms to welcome me in a hug whose aroma was purely dental, that sickeningly sweet odor overlaid with porcelain and laughing gas.

“Brothers of Bhotke,” he announced. “He’s back!”

Did they think I wouldn’t be? I waved to the standing membership, many of whom I knew by name because I had recorded their ravings about misapplication of funds (“Excuse me, do we really need to pay so much to an outside attorney?”—this from an inside attorney), the suitability of Coney Island for the annual picnic (“So much crowding, so much crime—I got a bungalow colony in Parksville upstate, the society could have almost for free”) and whether or not we should put up a monument at Beth David to those sons and daughters of Bhotke killed by the Nazis (“Who otherwise have no grave, no markers, no nothing—the refuse of history”). Though the membership of the Bhotke Young Men’s Society held divergent views on hundreds of questions, they were clearly united on three subjects: that Walter O’Malley, who owned the Dodgers, should be hanged for removing the beloved Bums to California; that a Democrat, any Democrat, should sit in the White House; that Russell Newhouse should be loved simply for inheriting Shushan Cats’ mantle as Kid Yid, the last of the fear-engendering Jews.