A Savage Life

by Michael Savage

  Goldsand, while enjoying what he thought was one of his last meals, indulged himself in a piece of this crusty loaf, quite different from the usual rye and pumpernickel. As he swallowed, he felt something tear off in his throat and a slimy fluid oozing out. And that was it.

  From then on he breathed easier. His countenance was restored. No fever. Nothing. Rudetsky, the doctor to these men, later speculated that a small bone had become lodged in the old man’s throat. A cyst enveloped this bone and began to grow. This is what the high fever was about, white corpuscles fighting off the invading growth.

  And then we have Morass. Morass was a famed bum who used to come in and out of the cold to get the warm heat of the market, but he had to pay. His payment would be ridicule. See, he’d come in and they’d start with, “Hey, Morass, come on over here, I need a cup of coffee, you’ll go out to the galley for me.” He’d walk over—he shuffled over from side to side, with his overcoat and his red, runny nose—and he’d say, “My name isn’t Morass. It’s Morris.” “Yeah, yeah sure, Morass—oh, I mean, Morris—I mean Morass.” “My name isn’t Morass, it’s Morris.” And the interesting thing is: Did they say “More Ass” or “he is in a morass” because he was a bum? Or did they just play games with his name? Were they Shakespearean? I mean, did they know that a bum was in a morass? Another act would be this: “Hey, Charlie,” my father would yell, “did you hear, someone saw Morass sitting in the galley eating beans and whipped cream?” And Morris would yell out, “That’s not true. I never eat whipped cream with beans. No one eats whipped cream with beans.” And then Charlie would laugh; a laugh of ridicule would ring out, and then he’d say, “It’s true, Benny, I heard it from so and so. You know, the guy who owns the dry goods store on Rivington.” “It’s not true. I don’t care what the dry foods guy said. No one eats beans and whipped cream.” All right, now if it happened once, you could accept it. But this was going on for ten years, the beans-and-whipped-cream version.

  And then there was Louie, another side character—to me the most fascinating, the one I loved most. Louie had long hair down to his shoulders. Louie was skinny; he didn’t eat. Louie was brilliant. Louie was a bum poet. He got a monkey, but he didn’t get the kind of monkey that everyone else got. You know, most get squirrel monkeys, those skinny, pathetic, stupid monkeys with skinny tails. Louie got some gargantuan woolly monkey with sharp teeth. Woolly monkeys are built like bears. Anyway, Louie used to clean bronzes for my father, whistling while he worked in “the pit.” No one knew Louie was smart. When Louie painted our house, he taught me geometry. I was doing geometry homework and Louie would help me with it. Louie also did tricks for me in the dining room of the house. He’d bend a nail; he showed me different gimmicks. He could take a nail and bend it, and he was the one that taught me. He warmed it with his hand; he didn’t put it over the fire. He said you take the thing, you put your thumbs on it, and you just keep the pressure up as tight as you can, never stopping for an instant—the nail will bend because of the heat. He taught me the psychology of bending a nail rather than the physical stupidity of it.

  Louie lived with some woman over in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and he spent every cent he made at the bar, at Hammel & Korn. He’d go right from my father’s market. At dinner, my father would say, “Louie, why don’t you go buy yourself a pair of shoes?” “I don’t need shoes, I got a pair.” And he’d go get loaded in Hammel & Korn; he’d buy everybody drinks, the whole bar. I mean, when he had money he bought everyone drinks, and he’d do nothing but play the jukebox, smoke a cigarette, drink, and tap his foot next to the jukebox, whistling.

  Well, as time would have it, Louie’s lust was tested. Louie acquired twenty thousand dollars. How? He was walking, drunk, stumbled into a car that had a fender that was ripped off, a rusty thing, and he tore his leg open. He got some Hebe ambulance chaser, a brilliant lawyer, who won him forty thousand. Louie got twenty of it. Guess what Louie did with his twenty grand? That’s right, he spent it in six months at Hammel & Korn. He didn’t change his apartment. He didn’t buy a pair of shoes. He did not buy an overcoat. Instead he got three girlfriends from Harlem and moved them into his house, and every night he appeared at Hammel & Korn and bought everyone drinks, and put money in the jukebox. SO, with his money, nothing changed; he just had more of what he did. And after the money was gone—ah, wait a minute! He did buy a few things with some of it. You know what he bought? Bronzes from my father. The bronzes that he cleaned in the basement with cyanide. He came into my father’s market, and he bought bronzes from the boss. “All right, Benny, how much is that?” Whatever my father would say, Louie’s answer was—“I’ll take it.” He bought bronzes. And then of course when his money ran out, he sold them back to my father. My father didn’t beat him on them; he bought them back for about the same price, which is what he always did because they were always increasing in value. But, there was the cleaning man buying bronzes from his boss. Now, of course, I bought a bronze from my father as a result of that, I think. Because the first money I made, I spent on bronzes from my father, to show him that that’s what I wanted; and the one bronze I still own is a copy of Rodin’s Thinker. It’s a powerful signed bronze, done in 1880. Louie collected twenty G’s and went down the tube anyway. Last I heard, he was alive, and had had a heart attack also; he was living in Greenpoint, alone, with an empty cage.

  Another subcharacter comes to mind; a simple guy. It’s the first time I learned about schizoids. This guy was a doctor. He came to the market with Afghan hounds. He was the complete Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. All I knew him as was “Doc.” OK, Doc would come in on occasion, most of the time beautifully dressed, impeccable, with two Afghan hounds. Just a very cultivated-looking gent. On the other hand, the same man would occasionally come in rags, disheveled, needing a shave, looking half-crazed, snot coming from his nose, and nobody dared to say to him that he looked fucked-up. They’d kibbitz him a little. They’d say, “Hey, Doc,” Doc this, and Doc that. I remember once I went up to him and said, “Hey, Doc,” and my father pulled me aside and said, “You never call him that, you don’t talk to him in the tone we do.” I said, “Why? Everyone else does.” He said, “Because he understands when we do, he wouldn’t understand when you do.” Anyway, he was an alcoholic, and the only man I ever saw go through a complete double personality.

  Next door to the market was Neiberg’s Funeral Home, where I went downstairs at the age of eleven to see my first corpse embalming, and watched the whole thing. Later, I wrote a beautiful poem about it, about the woman’s guts, blood running out, mixing with the garbage of the city in the Narrows, somewhere, flowing, and mixing with the sea. Anyway, there was this old woman being embalmed down there. I was eleven, standing and looking at her bouncing like a piece of jelly on the embalmer’s slab, and when I came upstairs, there must’ve been a different look on my face. It was a hot summer’s day. I was standing outside the funeral parlor; my father came out of the market: “Hey, Michael, where were you, Michael?” He said, “Were you downstairs?” I said, “Ye-yes, I was.” He said, “Did you see?” I said, “Yeah, they showed me a corpse.” And he got very upset, more upset than mad, my father, and he said to me, “You shouldn’t a seen that. You shouldn’t have a seen that. You’re too young, you’re too young.” Of course, he was deathly afraid of death.

  Now, there was a beautiful little undertaker by the name of Barney. He was a chauffeur, always neat. He’d hang out in the market. But Barney was the only man who said to me later on in life, when he’d see a pretty woman go by, “I had my share.” And I repeated this to my friend once, I was about sixteen; and you know, later on in life that guy said to me, “I hope that when I’m Barney’s age I can look at a young girl go by and say, ‘I had my share.’ ”

  THE VERY EARLIEST MEMORY I HAVE OF THE MARKET IS OF being brought there at age three or four, perhaps five, maybe on a Sunday, with my sister Sheila, who is older than me by a few years, to sell our used comic books. For me it was a great escape from the Mil
k Police, my mother and her tenement lieutenants. My father taught us not to throw away old comic books. He told us, “If you want to make some money, take the books you bought for ten cents, put them in a neat stack, draw a line through the ten cents with a big black crayon, and mark them down so you can get five, six cents.” And to us, this was simply a miracle. I mean, that you could get any money back for something you had used was incredible. Sure enough we tried it, and we were able to sell our joke books. So we’d go down on the weekends, and of course this is how we were broken in to the concept of merchandising. Very similarly, if you go to a Chinese grocery in San Francisco, you might still see a young child learning to count on the abacus from a grandmother or a grandfather, or learning how to give change. Training is very early. We didn’t need Sesame Street to teach us how to add and how to subtract. We learned to add and subtract the minute we figured out that it had some value to us. If we paid ten pennies for something and could get five pennies for it, we knew we had five pennies more than the kid who threw the comic book in the garbage. SO, that’s basically how you learn to add and subtract, and that’s the basic value of mathematics. We didn’t need any “New Math,” no old math; it was called simple arithmetic.

  The apprenticeship continued. I would go in with my father on a weekend, usually a Sunday. I remember in the early years before things went bad for my father—and I don’t mean businesswise, I mean with my brother sick and all, the one who was eventually hospitalized in a mental institution—before things really got on him and he had a nervous breakdown when he was about thirty-five. I remember he was joyful on Sundays, which I would spend with him. There were a lot of games we used to play in the market. Games like these:

  Physically the market was laid out so that there were approximately one, two, three, four, five different-sized stands on the left side of the market as you faced the front to rear, and five on the right, with steps at the rear going downstairs to the basement. And each stand had wooden doors that swung down and up, which were locked at the end of the day. On a typical Sunday, the market was filled with people. It was something to behold, like Coney Island or maybe Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum. It was jammed with sightseers, real buyers, no buyers, bums in and out of the cold, natal hippies; it was just fantastic, the beautiful hum of people on a Sunday, out spending time and money. And, you know, it was busy, just busy—it would be like a stage; the show opened, the crowds came in, and by three or four o’clock it was packed. Sometimes you could hardly walk through the crowd. And there was a beautiful feeling of prosperity in the air. To me it didn’t matter, money or not. Obviously commerce was at the base of it all. But it was the buzz, the buzz we used to hear, that really turned me on.

  So the crowd would be out on the main gangway of the Ship of Merchants, walking. There’d be someone gobbling the peanuts and dropping the shells on the wooden deck, eating and gobbling and dropping, eating and gobbling and dropping. And Benny didn’t just stand there and take it. He wanted to get even a little. So, naturally, there evolved a whole array of pranks that were played on the customers. They were all gentle tricks. The one I liked best as a young kid was the least complicated: You simply squatted down behind your stand, where you couldn’t be seen. There was always a forest of bronze candelabra between you and the people, so they couldn’t see you—not with all the lights bouncing off the shining bronze. They could only see the bronzes and the paintings and the clocks. So we’d squat down, my father and I, and he’d have a water gun, and we’d squirt through the bronzes and water a person. Now, of course, the beauty was not just squirting, but to observe the human reaction to being surprised. It was so primitive; we were two primeval hunters attacking invaders and watching their reaction as they were stung with our poison darts. The typical reaction would be: “Hey!” as the victim glanced up. It was very logical; they’re not stupid. The man gets wet inside a market, he figures the ceiling is leaking. He doesn’t assume there is a man squatting down behind his merchandise, squirting him with a water gun. So he looks up at the ceiling. And he starts to complain. He says, “Hey, mister,” to somebody behind a stand. “Hey, mister, your skylight is leaking” meant that the guy had been squirted by Benny and Michael behind the bronzes. And there was a standard response to that: “Nah, I’m telling ya,” they’d say, “there’s nothing—the skylight is not leaking, we just had it fixed.” “Look, I’m, not crazy,” the guy would argue, “I’m telling ya, I got wet. The skylight is leaking.” “Naahh, the skylight’s not leaking, you oughta go have your head examined better. There’s no water comin’ in.” And this way they’d steam up the customer till he was almost at the point of socking somebody, and then they’d grudgingly admit, “Well, maybe the skylight is leaking a little, we’ll have it checked.” And that would disarm the guy. So that was one of our gimmicks.

  Now that you must appreciate, the beauty of being four years old, or five, and squirting another adult with the complexity of your father—I mean, he even thought it up—can you picture the beauty of it? Great. I’m glad you can. Because as I got older, there were still other tricks. The simplest is one I’m sure you’ve seen elsewhere, but to a child who had never seen it, it was magnificent. What was the gimmick? You’d solder a quarter really well onto a nail. And you’d hammer the quarter into the wooden countertop, in an out-of-the-way place, kind of away from your view. And then on a busy day you’d make believe that you were occupied elsewhere, and you’d wait to see who would try to steal the quarter. It was a beautiful thing to see the hand reach out, the “thief” waiting for you not to look. As he’d grab the quarter and try to pull it away, it would stick to the counter, and the look on his face—the look of how he was caught; his hand caught in a bear trap.

  Another of our games was the tapping trick, which carried me from the age of six to about thirteen, fourteen. This must have been developed in a carnival somewhere, because it was somewhat of a barker’s cane that was used, although if you didn’t have a cane, a yardstick could substitute, or even a small stick. It was simple. Here was how we’d set it up: A man would be at my father’s counter bargaining with him, or at someone else’s counter, and you’d go up behind in the crowd. Of course, you wouldn’t give away your trick by looking down; it had been perfected. You’d place the cane just above his toes, over his shoes. And just as he’d reach in his pocket to pull out a coin, to pay for merchandise, you’d give him a good tap right on the toe just as the coins came out. That’s it. The guy was finished. He’d look down. You’d pull the cane away and he’d start looking down. He’d search the floor; he was sure he’d dropped the coin because it hit his foot. He’d start in, he’d say, “Look, mister, I dropped a coin,” and then of course the other guy would say, “You didn’t drop nothin’. I’m tellin’ ya, ya didn’t drop. Stop botherin’ me, you’re making it up.” And this guy would search and search and he wouldn’t go away; for fifteen minutes he’d be looking on the floor for a coin that never existed.

  Now, if that doesn’t turn you on, we had a better method. Actually, the tapping game was fantastic, because you’d find people have very different sensitivities. I mean, there were times when I was hitting people on the feet with a yardstick—you’d start with your tap light; no response. You’d tap a little again; no response. Again, again; no response! Till you’re actually pounding on the guy’s foot with a stick. No response. To vitalize the sensitivities of these dull-footed individuals, another variety of the tapping game was originated. This was the jingling game. You would simply take a coin and drill a hole in it. Then you’d cut rubber bands and tie them together so they made a string, and you’d tie the rubber band string through the hole in the coin, and you’d wrap one end around your finger. And then while the man dug for a coin in his pocket, as he was paying, you would throw the coin in your hand out onto the wooden floor so it jingled, and it would bounce right back, really fast, faster than the eye, almost, and the man would look down, right? He was sure he dropped the coin. And those guys were the wo
rst. When you pulled that trick, that was the final one, because you would get them looking for an hour. They would search through the dust and the grime underneath the counter for the coin they were sure they dropped; a coin they would never find.

  A few other details come to me regarding the dear old market. In particular, I remember, in the back of the store, there were two of those dimwitted signs bearing particularly cute American phrases. One was to the effect, “We grow up too soon old and too late smart.” It took me years to figure that out; by the time I’d figured it out, it was too late to do anything about it, I was too old. And the other one was from the class of sayings, like, “Old golfers don’t die, they just lose their balls.” But this one in particular struck me every day as I went to the bathroom downstairs in that dingy, dark, depressing, stinking bathroom that I was afraid to pee in. It stank, it had a dim 20-watt yellow electric bulb, it was cold. And inside this horrible bathroom, atop this stinking urinal, inside this freezing, cold Dickensian basement craphouse, there was one of those “old golfers lose their balls” signs, and this one said in pseudo-Yiddish script, “Please piss in the bowl.” Of course it took me years to understand, (a) that it wasn’t in Yiddish, and (b) what it said, that it really just said, “Please piss in the bowl.” For years, I thought it was some kind of religious sign to do with peeing; you know, from the Old World, like from the Torah. Well, what can a kid know? SO, it took me years to figure that one out.

  Now I’m jumping ahead to years later. My father has had his first heart attack and it’s a great trauma to the family, because he was this great strong man, yelling, telling everybody what to do and he was usually right. Finally, the patriarch of the family was laying under oxygen. Number One Son, ripped from college, has to take over getting the family income. So I would open up my father’s antiques market every morning, and try to do a little business. And I didn’t do too badly, I thought; I brought home a few—five, six hundred—bucks a week, gross income; who knows what it netted? Nevertheless, there was a little cash flow coming into the house. You guessed it. It wasn’t good enough for the old man. Under oxygen, he gets my report: “How’s business?”—“Not bad. Moe came in, he took his lamps.” “What: What lamps? Don’t let any of those sonsabitches bullshit you. They’ll come in and they’ll tell you, ‘how’s Benny,’ and this and that, and they’ll look to rob a pair of candelabra on ya that cost me seven fifty.” All right, that’s not good enough. He’s laying under oxygen there, a week in the tent, he remembers, he gets a bug in his head. In front of the antiques, he sold old clothes—to always be safe; he had it all figured out. In front he sold used clothes, a rusty razor blade, an old knife, an old fork that he bought at an auction. He took in ten cents, fifteen. He always said it made lunch money; if the antiques didn’t sell, he’d make money from the junk in the front. As you progressed back, the merchandise became more expensive till finally at the top tier was the expensive stuff. So under oxygen he remembered his lot of clothes. He asked me, “How are the clothes going?” Who remembered clothes? To me it was a bunch of rags. We’d throw the boxes out and let the bums go through it. He said, “What about the sweater?” I said, “What sweater?”—“The ski sweater, the good black sweater, the Austrian sweater.” “I don’t know about no sweater,” I said. “I sold it to someone for about two bits, twenty-five.” That did it. In his oxygen, they almost had to come in and give him a sedative. That his stupid son running the family show sold a sweater worth at least three dollars for a quarter. This was all that was on his mind.