by Ira Gold
Copyright © 2016 by Ira Gold
All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gold, Ira, author.
Debasements of Brooklyn / Ira Gold.
Sag Harbor, NY : The Permanent Press, [2016]
ISBN 978-1-57962-443-9
eISBN 978-1-57962-474-3
1. Gangsters—Fiction. 2. Couples—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction.
4. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Social life and customs—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3607.O4355 D43 2016
813'.6—dc23 2016002728
Printed in the United States of America
For H—whom I hope will one day tell me
the other letters of his name
Part I
1
Lovers’ Quarrel
These basic facts come direct from Pauli Bones. About everything else I extemporize.
Scrunchy Cho, a pawn, a nobody, runs down Avenue V and East Nineteenth Street. It’s midnight in Sheepshead Bay, as it is everywhere in this part of Brooklyn. In the houses—two family stuccos and stubby brick apartment buildings—not one person is looking out the window to see if Scrunchy can evade his pursuers. He gulps air and sweat oozes from the clogged pores of his parchment skin.
Ever hear of wrong place, wrong time? Well, that isn’t Scrunchy’s issue. Scrunchy has stabbed one of our whores. Yes, she had lifted a bill and a half from his stash when he made the mistake of falling asleep in her bed for ten minutes. Had Scrunchy not been such a cautious man things might have turned out better. But he wakes with a start, wearing a sleeveless undershirt and smudged white underpants. Melissa Apple, aka Candi Apple, a twenty-year-old from Parched, Arizona, who has worked for Vinnie Five-Five for four years, lies next to him on the bed, her eyes closed: perhaps asleep, probably not.
Scrunchy doesn’t disturb her when he puts on his pants. A beanpole with a mean face, lined as an accordion, Scrunchy counts his money a dozen times a day, more when he’s nervous. Fingering his cash calms him.
So he knows by his roll’s weight that he’s short, even taking into account the two bills he gave to Candi. When he sees that a dear fifty and a precious hundred have also gone missing, he pulls Candi up by her hair and smacks her face. She starts shouting. Scrunchy has only a few seconds to get his money or his revenge. Candi curses and swears that she has taken nothing, so Scrunchy cuts her face and sticks her in the breast. Then he jumps out the second-floor window just as the guys burst in. They take off after him. Pauli Bones and Garlic Pannetto race out on foot, while Benny Double-Down gets the car.
Scrunchy’s half-block head start might have held up if he hadn’t tripped in front of 1670 East Nineteenth. Garlic and Pauli Bones close in quick. Scrunchy memorizes the address in case he ever has the opportunity to initiate a suit for the broken sidewalk. Then he streaks down an alley. Hopping a fence, he dashes onto Eighteenth Street just as Double-Down turns the car onto the street.
Scrunchy is hard to miss, as he’s the only creature on the block running for his life. Double-Down, a terrible blackjack player but a decent thug, cuts onto the sidewalk right in front of Scrunchy. Because he keeps glancing over his shoulders, Scrunchy crashes into the chrome bumper with such force that he dislocates his right kneecap. Double-Down, a man of some heft, bulls out of the car clutching a tire iron, just as Bones’s wiry frame comes into view. In the rear, Garlic arrives as Scrunchy bleeds out from a half-dozen orifices, some of them created just for this occasion. More importantly, Pauli Bones kicks Scrunchy into the once-in-a-lifetime experience of a cerebral hemorrhage. Garlic doesn’t bother to get his loafers bloody on an already unconscious Scrunchy. All three, however, lend a hand tossing the corpse into the trunk where Double-Down keeps a spare tarp for just such an eventuality.
In less than five minutes, they are back in the house, wrapping Candi in a sheet for disposal. The knife has nicked her aorta.
Double-Down, laconic as always, eulogizes, “Fuckin’ shame.”
“Nice fucking girl,” Garlic, the expansive one, growls. “Good ho.”
Bones, the conscience of the group, intones, “Told her a hundred times about rollin’ these animals.”
None fear any sort of investigation connecting them to either murder. Anyone who may have loved Candi or Scrunchy would consider their disappearances as both a biological and a karmic inevitability. Candi has a young son back in Parched living with her own mother, a forty-year-old ambulance driver and itinerant meth addict who would raise the boy with as much care and devotion as she raised Candi/Melissa.
The furthest thought from each man’s mind is war. Justice has been served; things are even. The only issue left to negotiate, perhaps, is the money that Candi lifted from Scrunchy that rightly belongs to his next of kin, if he has any. For safekeeping, they divide it evenly, along with the contents of Scrunchy’s cherished stash.
2
A Canticle for Scrunchy
The war, in fact, surprises everyone in Vinnie Five-Five’s orbit. For one thing, Scrunchy’s passing, while unmourned, does not go unnoticed. Scrunchy’s superiors, of whom he had many, meet in a small, decrepit apartment below a strip club on Eighth Avenue and Fifty-Third Street, also in Brooklyn.
There, Crazy Bo Moon of Sunset Park and Wuhan Prefecture Penitentiary, along with his sociopathic underboss U Li, a Burmese of Chinese descent who trained in prison conservatories all over Southeast Asia, agree that the Italians have been in decline ever since a brief flowering during the Cinquecento. They posit that the whole crew should have been knocked off at the end of the Renaissance. It is time for the East to rise and to take over south Brooklyn. Scrunchy’s murder is no skin off Crazy Bo’s back. (He, in fact, blames Scrunchy for craving white-devil pussy when the best girls in New York live in houses right there in Sunset Park.) But it gives the Chinese boss an excuse to finish the job on the Italians that assimilation and a low birthrate started.
Before the war can begin, however, the Chinese need to make a deal with the Russians, whose territory lies on the ocean side of Sheepshead Bay, in Brighton Beach. For years the Russians and Italians skirmished. The Italians, in part because the younger generation moved to Jersey and points west, had their territory shrink to the Gravesend area on the F train and the Sheepshead Bay stop on the Q and B lines. It doesn’t take long for Crazy Bo and U Li to contract the job of taking out the small Italian crew that controls such an insignificant principality to Vlad the Impaler. Scrunchy Cho must be avenged.
Sensing opportunity, the Russians readily agree to undertake the bulk of the annihilation.
So with the energy characteristic of American immigrants since the early European arrivals set about exterminating the native population, Vlad initiates the slaughter with the same conscientious devotion to detail.
Double-Down, slow and heavy, is the first casualty. His body is found in a van on Ocean Parkway and Avenue S, in front of a very large Orthodox yeshiva. Pasty-faced boys in black hats and white shirts crowd around the yellow police tape and watch as the ambulance pulls the bullet-riddled corpse from the vehicle. These unworldly innocents titter when they realize what hangs from his mouth is not the stub of a cigar but a chunk of penis. (In the Sicilian tradition, genitals in the mouth mean the victim violated some sexual taboo. Something must have been lost in the Russian translation, for Double-Down spent all his energ
y losing at cards.)
A day later, sanitation workers uncover Garlic’s body stuffed in a hefty bag, actually three different ones, under the elevated on McDonald Avenue.
Garlic and Double-Down had helped run Vinnie Five-Five’s two houses. Of Sicilian descent, they both dreamed of becoming made men, which even in this debased age amounts to a license to mint money providing you avoid assassination.
Pauli Bones still exists. Despite his attention-deficit jumpiness, it will be harder to whack him. He thinks like a stone killer during those times he’s not actually being a stone killer. He’s also a great earner (though a lousy spender) who Vinnie would be forced to avenge. As for me, I’m just a stringer, half-Italian, half-Jewish, half-asser who kicks upstairs no more than a G a week. My main gig is in the sleepy backwater of selling weed. Besides my clients from this territory, I have hooked up with the supers in the Brooklyn neighborhoods where the people actually know shit about Brooklyn. They retail to the social media types who populate the gentrified one-bedrooms in Carrel Gardens and like to think they’re cool and tough because they don’t live in Gramercy Park.
At the gym, I have acquired some bulk on my six-three frame. So I work security, do collections, and provide muscle wherever needed for Vinnie. Easy gigs for an autodidact.
Actually, I hate my job, I hate my colleagues, and I hate Vinnie Five-Five most of all. The homicidal pip-squeak lusts for every penny I kick up. Worse, Pauli Bones has hinted that certain associates, maybe lusting after my little business, have intimated to Vinnie that something about me is not right. This, coupled with my semiobvious lack of commitment, has awakened in Vinnie a murderous suspicion. Nothing more dangerous than a gangster who wants out of the gang. The Feds can flip a guy like that as easily as they can a light switch. Every day I sense that Vinnie’s loyalty to my dead father, his old bookkeeper, diminishes.
Ah, I find my whole crew to be no better than the barbarians on Wall Street, the tenure-fuckers in academia or the scum in Washington. Money, pussy, respect. The more people desire these things, the less I want them. Why? I don’t have a clue. I never considered myself a contrarian. Probably I’m cracking up. But all I crave lately is freedom from historical imperatives. Fuck history. Is that too much to ask?
Adding to my woozy sense of dislocation is this fiery desire to do nothing but read this collection of books I inherited from my dad. Why? It makes no sense. Not since I attempted suicide nearly eight years ago had a train hit me so hard. I used to like getting laid.
In fact, most people as pedigreed as I—my father laundered every dime of Vinnie’s money for decades—would want to make the most of the endless opportunities for graft. One can even get high on the threat of getting clipped. But I want out. I never enjoyed head banging. In the ten years of doing this and that for Vinnie, I beat up maybe two-dozen people. I may intimidate with my size, but Bones, with his quick fists and crazy eyes, with his psychopathic mannerisms and sharpened kitchen knife, always finds himself in situations where serious violence occurs. Cautious people avoid me; only the insane mess with Pauli Bones.
Maybe it’s a phase. Maybe I’m reading too many of dad’s Penguin classics. I really wish that money, pussy, and respect still held my interest. But I find myself thinking of a million other things, including how the pursuit of money, pussy, and respect has brought me little in the way of contentment.
If I just disappear, vanish, I’ll never be able to return. Like many CEOs today, Vinnie believes his lowest-level workers have no right to retire. I could be a danger floating around on the outside. Yes, this neighborhood indeed sucks—savage people, hardly any green space—but the only ones whom I love are here.
3
Favors
Though a serial killer, Pauli Bones is solicitous. “Lay low. Vinnie’s working on a sit-down with Crazy Bo and He Lies. Who the fuck calls his kid He Lies anyway?”
“U Li.” I correct and then speculate, “That might not be his given name.”
“Asshole.” Pauli Bones eyes me with enormous malice. “Every time you open your mouth . . .” Bones is so antsy that he rarely finishes a sentence while hopping from foot to foot and eyeing the tables hoping for some trouble. The poor maniac mourns his friends. “Double-Down was a degenerate gambler, but Garlic didn’t do nothin’. The lazy shit didn’t want to get blood on his shoes.”
Pauli Bones and I are working Vinnie Five-Five’s poker room on West Third Street and Avenue X. It is a 1,200-square-foot second-floor apartment where the interior walls have been removed to create a functional open floor plan that fits a dozen round, green-felt tables. It’s a slow night. Only five tables are taken. We’re standing near the door.
In the crew, Pauli’s the only one I hang with. We sometimes drink and get high at an after-hours club on Fourth Avenue in Bay Ridge. Pauli’s best stories concern hospital workers—doctors, nurses, orderlies—who are his main suppliers of prescription drugs. He likes to say that the medical profession is ripe with sick motherfuckers.
“Look dickwad . . .” I wait for Pauli Bones to gather his rather simple thoughts. “The Chinks and Vlad are going to split Vinnie’s territory. They don’t give a Peking duck who did Scrunchy. Probably glad the ugly mutt’s dead.”
“Vinnie’s not going down without a fight. One call to Tony D . . .”
Insanity again eddies from Pauli Bones’s fevered brain and smokes his black eyes. “You think Tony D gives a rat’s cunt about Vinnie? Vinnie’s been on the shelf for a year.”
I am an idiot. Why didn’t I know this? I know that Tony D—the New Jersey boss of our gerrymandered Brooklyn family—is unhappy with the money Vinnie kicks his way. Our shrinking territory has cut into our profits. Either earn or lose protection. Or maybe Tony thinks that Vinnie is holding out. Still, it’s hard to believe that Tony D will allow the Russians to take over. “They’re first cousins.”
“You’re a moron and every book you read makes you more stupid. I can’t talk to you for five minutes before I want to kill you.”
Pauli Bones recognizes my dissatisfaction, knows that I am not the goon I intermittently attempt to be. Luckily, however, he finds my burgeoning inner life a source of amusement and a good entrée for abuse and insult. I sense, if not respect, at least tolerance.
“I’m sorry, Pauli. The political winds shift so fast—”
“Don’t be an asshole. I’m telling you the motherfucking emmes. No reinforcements. If the negotiations fail, just a slaughter.” Emotion can overcome even the toughest lunatic. Pauli Bones sits down in the chair, unusual for a man with his unstable energy.
It is entirely possible that somewhere in his traumatized psyche Bones grieves not only for himself but for his friends and for our doomed way of life. I take a few steps toward him and put my hand on his shoulder.
“Get your fucking hands off me.” Then, with heartfelt sincerity, he pleads, “You got a couple of bills I can borrow?”
By this Pauli Bones means give me 200 you stupid fuck. But like most of Pauli’s deepest desires since childhood, this one too would go unfulfilled. I take out my wallet and open it. I show him the empty billfold. “Nada.”
And then, suddenly, I reconsider. I have little enough for my own war chest, but Pauli destroys money in the crematorium of financial idiocy. Everything he buys he can’t afford, despite a large, tax-free income.
In the end, something compels me to pull out a couple of hundred dollars and wave it in front of Pauli’s face. He jerks his head away, but I see a flicker of surprise and gratitude before he snatches the money from my hand. “Find a place to hide. I just saved your sorry-ass life.”
I don’t know how to take Bones’s warning. I can see how paranoia might be one of his issues. On the other hand, they did decapitate Garlic.
4
Origins
Do I need to worry about this war? Until an hour ago, I thought only Vinnie would ever consider me worth whacking. After all, I am Mr. Small-Time. Dr. Insignificant. My existence is of interest t
o no one. I’m not fully Italian so I can never be made. My father’s name, and consequently mine, is Fenster. Dad was a numbers man, an accountant and a horseplayer. But he made his nut no matter what. And his interests soared beyond the neighborhood, sometimes even beyond the ponies. The seeds he planted when I was young have blossomed into a beautiful garden that dazzles me as it illuminates my misery.
My mother, on the other hand, had been a Gugliani. Outwardly, I resemble her. My tribal marking confirms my membership as a fully paid-up Guido: the slicked-back hair, the focus on my musculature, my fascination with an outdated and seedy underworld dying here in Sheepshead Bay.
My dad had tried to protect me. He insisted on naming me Howard, hoping, thinking magically, like a gambler, that such a name would keep me out of the life. But I lost “Howard” and any hope of living straight the moment I translated my surname from the Germanic for my future crew which included Vinnie’s twin sons—Gus and Julius. This life-changing event occurred in third grade. I have since learnt to keep my mouth shut.
So today they call me Windows. (Fenster in German.) Unlike emaciated Pauli Bones, or even Vinnie Five-Five, who got his nickname forty years ago when he was the tiny (five foot five) starting point guard for the Lincoln High basketball team, Windows says nothing about my anatomy or personality. If anything, I am opaque. You cannot look through me and see my soul, even those silly enough to believe one exists. Today, Vinnie’s nickname still works, for he’s five foot five in diameter, having put on some girth since his basketball days. My nickname, like my half-breed status, has descended like a supernatural visitation, foisted upon me by a universe whose workings make little sense to the casual observer and no sense at all to the deep thinkers.
From my mother I inherited an attachment to this aging neighborhood and its people, a loyalty returned with painful conditions. Other than great books, my father bequeathed an aversion to regular work, which I still consider my healthiest instinct.
