Debasements of Brooklyn

by Ira Gold

Vinnie has my number. He shoves me against the wall. “I want to explain something.”

  I let him continue.

  “Drive to the building, wait for them to come out, and drive away. I don’t even want you to speed. Capisce? A few cocksuckers gone. Who cares?”

  How can I explain that my reluctance revolves not around getting caught but around participating in the crime? How do I explain to Vinnie that I don’t believe in retaliatory murder?

  “Me and your family go way back.” Vinnie appeals to old ties. “Your father worked for my brother before he worked for me. We can’t let these new fucks from countries that have no respect for tradition come into our homes and pillage us without doing fuckin’ nothin’.”

  “Fuck no,” I agree.

  Vinnie waxes nostalgic. “We used to control the whole of South Brooklyn—Flatbush, Brighton Beach, Bensonhurst, Gravesend, Sheepshead Bay. Millions of people depended on our whorehouses and crap games.” Vinnie hitches his pants and adjusts his groin. He winces as he cuts a fart. “When Brooklyn was a wasteland, we operated dozens of bookie joints. We had more money on the street than JPMorgan Chase. We have a right to be in the place that our ancestors civilized. Don’t you want your nieces to grow up on the same streets like you?”

  I can do nothing but continue to agree. It’s always these beautiful, sentimental visions that lead to total destruction. Sentimentality is the hydrogen bomb of stunted lives.

  “We got to wipe these animals out. For our people. We focus on pleasure. Gambling, sex. The Russians, the gooks, don’t care who gets hurt. Look at what happened in China when the gangsters took over. Forty million people starved to death.”

  Vinnie surprises me with his allusion to Mao’s genocidal policies. In fact, his range of references—the appeal to history, to family, to a stable social order—impresses me. It doesn’t make me want to go out and murder anyone, but I understand his point. Retreat or, worse, assimilation doesn’t occur to Vinnie, as it does not occur to the Russians or to the Chinese. Instead of a brotherhood of the bloodthirsty, the nation-state paradigm holds. Religion, language, culture, style of whacking people all serve to unite the most violent elements of each society, whether these go by the name of Mafia, Crips, or marines.

  Vinnie concludes with a gentle exhortation. “If you fuck up, Windows, I’ll slice your balls off and stick ’em up your ass. Your dad was a genius but that goes only so far.”

  We return to the table. IRA fondles his automatic weapon, licking and kissing the narrow barrel, to the girlish delight of Gus and Julius. Even Moron is smiling.

  “I love you, I love you,” IRA’s tongue darts into the hole, “you beautiful ho—.”

  “That’s enough,” Vinnie growls. “Get ready. Don’t forget. You kick in the door, take care of business and get out. Frankie . . .” Vinnie throws him a chain with a car key that Frankie Hog snatches out of the air with the darting suddenness of a frog’s tongue catching a fly.

  “A red Odyssey parked down the block on this side of the street,” Vinnie informs.

  So Frankie lifts his massive butt off the chair and waddles to the door, a fat goose with a gaggle of gangsters behind him: IRA, quiet now, followed by Gus and Pauli Bones. The guns they hide under their jackets.

  We wait a minute and then Vinnie places another set of keys on the table and shoots them at me. “It’s a blue Explorer parked right in front.”

  My head pounds. I start to sweat. I walk in a quagmire, stuck in the tar, swallowed by quicksand. If I struggle I will only sink faster.

  Ah, maybe Vinnie’s right. The Federales won’t waste many resources on busted-up whorehouses. But I want none of this. The deaths of Double-Down and Garlic are a tragedy, almost exclusively for them, but they might have had loved ones. This escalation of hostilities will accomplish nothing but to hurry our own demise.

  I reach the car and begin to hyperventilate. Sweat now pours freely down my face. I begin heaving the remains of lunch. Even looking at the black mess reminds me of Ariel, her lovely face, her hammered sweetness, her civilian naïvetés, her love of Rembrandt, her excitement over a sandwich, our afternoon together.

  “If you can’t do this, fuckhead,” Julius says with great sympathy, “then get the hell out of here. I’ll drive.”

  I almost hand him the keys. But Vinnie expects me to drive. If I pull out of the operation now I’ll be considered nothing less than a traitor and a deserter.

  My chest tightens. I recognize the classic symptoms of a panic attack.

  Julius, this menacing troll, clenches his fist. I pull myself together. My stomach settles. The sweating stops. Only the tightness in my chest remains.

  My memory of what follows has the lightness of a dream and the dread of a nightmare. Up until now, I had been an idiot about many things. Whenever I think back, my actions mortify. I have humiliated myself on innumerable occasions. But never have I committed an act that would pursue me across my life. There’s no statute of limitations on murder, neither for the cops, nor for your conscience. Just when you think all is forgotten—twenty years have passed; you’ve picked up a wife, a kid, a mortgage, the whole catastrophe—and someone talks, someone cuts a deal, and boom, at two, three in the morning they kick down your door. Or you wake up with a terrified start and imagine they do.

  But contingency overpowers thoughts of the future. I drive in a daze. The streets look familiar yet blurry, as if shrouded in fog. The adrenaline wears off. No one says anything more. I pull up across from the targeted building, a gruesome construction of cracked stucco broken only by a grey steel door. Boards cover the windows of the houses on either side.

  I grab a parking spot right across from the building. What luck. We sit there for a second before Julius starts shouting, “What are you doing? Circle, circle you motherfucker! Do you want them to make us?”

  “We’ll lose the spot.”

  Julius takes out a .22, and places it against my temple. I put the car in drive.

  “Circle until 4:57,” Julius orders.

  The dashboard clock reads 9:10. I pull out my phone to check the right time, which I hope a cop won’t see and think I’m texting while driving.

  I turn left then right then left. Finally, Julius suggests, “Head back, asshole.”

  I do, while trying to think of a literary equivalent to my predicament: a relative innocent dragooned by circumstances into an immoral, life-altering event. Of course, millions of such novels exist, but under the pressure of the situation, I can’t think of any. I am totally alone.

  Back at the bordello I see that, as predicted, someone has taken the great spot. I am about to taunt Julius with this but think better of it. Not finding parking may sound like a minor issue, but it causes a serious problem. Where will I wait for the crew? The cops are not particularly vigilant about preventing murder, but they ferociously patrol these streets to nab double-parkers.

  “Where are you going?” Julius cries, too aggravated to add an obscenity.

  “I’m looking for a spot.”

  “Stop. Now. Asshole.” His short, sharp tone spits so much venom that the car’s interior turns toxic.

  So I slam on the brakes. I hate this. Double-parking functions as a magnet for the police.

  The Jew, Moron, and Julius pour out of the car and move toward the building. I keep my eyes on them in the rearview mirror. They get to the steel door. Moron, unknown in this neighborhood, rings the bell as if he is a customer. Julius and the Jew press up against the wall of the building. When the door opens they plan to enter shooting.

  But the door does not open. Moron rings again. He then pounds on the front of the door.

  Nothing.

  The street, full of dilapidated houses, is quiet. The local population knows trouble brews.

  Julius shoots the lock. I think this ludicrous and worry that a ricocheting bullet will kill someone. Then with the force of a mule, Julius kicks at the door until it flings open. The men plunge into the building and I can hear the pop, pop, po
p of the weapons. The band wrapped around my chest squeezes so tight that the black spots do an encore dance before my eyes.

  While concluding that this is no panic attack but an actual cardiac event, I see Julius and the others flee the building. They tumble into the car and a sudden surge of power pulses through me as I floor the accelerator. The tires shriek like tormented souls.

  Julius bellows. “Slow down, slow down, you fucking idiot.”

  A short stop jolts the guys in the backseat onto each other. Julius, riding shotgun, grabs the dashboard. No one says anything until Julius starts banging the passenger-side window.

  I turn my head and look at the Jew and Moron. At first, their faces remain inscrutable, but then Moron smiles and the Jew starts laughing.

  Julius, his face dark and combustible, turns. “Shut up.”

  As if waiting for this punch line, the two thugs in the back explode in hilarity.

  “What’s so fucking funny?” With my heart attack still in progress, I can’t imagine what set off these two humorless tarantulas.

  “No one there,” the Jew hiccups between giggles. “You should have seen Julius, shooting up a chair as if it was about to jump him.”

  Relief stands behind this merriment.

  “Did someone tell them?” Julius muses. “They fucking expected us.”

  The laughter dies down. If we have a rat in our midst, everyone is suspect. Ferreting out a double agent is a messy business and the upstate lakes teem with the bodies of both the rightly and the wrongly accused. But I have a feeling that IRA, the genius who planned the hit, had bum information. The whorehouse probably moved months ago.

  16

  Westward No

  We ride the rest of the way in silence. A half-dozen blocks from the defunct club, we abandon the stolen car. Each of us walks to HQ by different routes.

  I arrive last. Vinnie had set up a long table in the darkened room and the others are eating: pasta, meatballs, bread. IRA gulps wine like Sicilian peasants. “The skull,” he chews and loudly recounts his exploits, “blew into a million . . . remember when Letterman would drop watermelons from the roof. That’s what this guy’s head did. Brains in every fucking direction. I wish I could see that in slow mo.”

  Vinnie notes that the newly arrived group is not as bubbly as IRA.

  IRA, too, shuts up now and gazes at us with his usual mixture of contempt and hate.

  “You do it?” Vinnie Five-Five asks.

  “No one there.” Julius sits in a chair at the other end of the table, directly across from his father. “Place was empty. Maybe the Russians knew we were coming.”

  The empty house may have been a coincidence. Then again, if the Russians had known something, it’s interesting that they never told the Chinese. Maybe this is a first shot in the larger war the Russians planned to fight. Let the Wops take down a few Chinks to save trouble later on.

  Vinnie points to the food. “Mangia, mangia.” D’Angelo, a restaurant down the block, has sent everything over in giant serving dishes.

  I sit and IRA watches as if roaches just pulled up chairs. “You guys are losers.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Julius snaps. “This was your plan, your info.”

  Since IRA sucks up to Vinnie, he doesn’t directly confront the son. But I can see fratricide in his glare. “Our part went perfect,” he uses the broadest brogue. “We scared the living Christ out of them, too. You should have heard. Crying for his Chinese mama.”

  I keep my eyes on IRA as if he is pointing his weapon at me. He’s so insane that I don’t like being in the same room as him. He makes Pauli Bones seem as sagacious as Pitt the Elder. For one thing, Pauli Bones possesses enough brains to keep his mouth shut here.

  IRA talks, Julius talks, and then the others chime in. The Jew repeats, with less amusement, Julius blowing away the chair. Frankie Hog eats without stop, though he interjects that he nearly killed a woman pushing a carriage when she crossed right in front of them during their getaway. “I could already see that baby flying like a football.”

  Images of Eisenstein’s carriage scene in Potamkin pop into my mind and comfort me.

  When the spaghetti is passed to me, I put some on my plate because not to would have attracted attention. My chest still hurts, but not quite as badly. Time regains its normal speed.

  Vinnie waits for Julius to devour two plates of food before he says to him, “Come here.”

  They head toward the back room of the club. Vinnie turns and looks in my direction. Once, Julius points his thumb toward me. I am certain I will not leave the building alive.

  While this pounds through my mind, I again begin sweating. This is disastrous. If I am to have any chance of survival I need to appear innocent—pure, without sin, eager to massacre anyone who never did me wrong. But this thought, instead of forcing me to relax, causes me to shake. Salvation now rests in the toilet, where I can stick my head under the faucet.

  I manage to walk to the bathroom without even a glance at Vinnie or Julius.

  In the restroom, I splash water on my face until I feel the blood recede from my cheeks. I piss and rub more water on my face. I calm down sufficiently to die with dignity.

  I rejoin my friends with a steady gait. Vinnie and Julius have returned to the table.

  IRA continues to give his considered opinion, “We need to kill every single one. Wipe them off the fucking earth. Now. Before they hit back.”

  Everyone at the table nods except Pauli Bones and Vinnie.

  “We wait,” Vinnie says. “They kill two of ours, we kill three of theirs. If they want war, they got it. But before we go all in, I need to talk to Jersey.”

  Through some arcane Mafia politics, Vinnie got made in a New Jersey family and has been a captain since Greggy Boy’s demise. He answers to Tony D, who thinks Vinnie is holding out on him. In truth, the whores, gambling, and loan-sharking have all suffered from competition by the Russians and Chinese. Vinnie makes a living, but he closed the club and even his funeral parlor is barely breaking even. And customers there are steady as the rain in Seattle.

  Ah, we’re a legacy here. Every day there are fewer of us. Vinnie wants to pass the business to Julius, but the kid believes it may be time to start anew in a place where immigrant energy is not such a force. Julius has proposed setting up in the Southwest.

  But Vinnie, hard-headed, stone-hearted Vinnie, spins fantasies. “I think Vlad will make peace if we push him hard enough. We can go after the Chinks together. The cops hate Chinatowns because it’s fucking Chinatowns.”

  My eyes pierce into Vinnie. Is he referring to the greatest film noir ever made? If so, why doesn’t a fondness for cultural allusion contaminate Vinnie’s soul in the way it does mine?

  But it’s funny. Vinnie is as attached to this neighborhood as I am. What sentimentalists we gangsters be. Are we just in a rut, or are we loyal to a vision that has little currency in our rootless society? It’s a strange thing. Some people can’t wait to run from here. Others would rather be murdered in their beds than live decently in foreign lands.

  Julius argues, “Pop, we’re not dealing with men of honor. The Russians only know the knife and gun. They don’t sitdown like men. They kill cats, dogs, families. They don’t share business. We can expand out west, maybe into Arizona like Sammy the Bull. He’d still be there if he didn’t join a Nazi biker gang.”

  Vinnie bangs the table and everyone, even IRA, jumps. “We ain’t selling the business,” he shouts. “This neighborhood is getting rich from those cocksucking Russians and those Syrian Jews who would fuck a goat as long as it isn’t their wife. They need our whorehouses. Would Warren Buffett sell his company for $200 billion? He understands potential, the real value of his thing. And I know the value of Our Thing.”

  First Mao, then Polanski, and now Warren Buffett? At an initial glance, Vinnie seems such a dope. But then you get shocked by a reference here, a deep thought there. It gets so you can’t make nasty generalizations about anyone.

&nb
sp; Of all of them, I probably would benefit most from a change in climate. Though not exactly flinty, my body, hardened by training, suits the desert. I have never needed much water. But this life grips you by the gonads and you can’t move without your balls being torn from their sack.

  Besides, who would protect Judith? What would happen to the doormen who resell my pot to the hard-working, ambitious kids who make New York New York? Even my colleagues, psychos and murderers to a man, are familiar ghouls. Before the stress of war, I got along fine with Pauli Bones. You can have a simple conversation with him. And Gus and Julius have been my friends since childhood. We frequented the clubs, fought each other and strangers, shared women. The homies of one’s youth can never be replaced by friends made later in life. The protective ghost of my father hovers above this neighborhood.

  But no amount of wishing can keep things from changing. Vinnie Five-Five glowers at the head of the table. Maybe he considers his sons ungrateful for not appreciating the risks he takes to keep his kingdom in place. “We stay and fight,” Vinnie snaps. “We secure our territory here first. No one pushes Vinnie Spoleto out of his home.”

  Vinnie Five-Five speaks heroically, channeling every great general in history. He also sounds delusional. At best Vinnie Five-Five fights a rear-guard action. In this way Vinnie and I are alike. We yearn for dead worlds, a fatal mistake in any business.

  Vinnie stands. His stomach sticks out less than usual. The bastard has been losing weight. I wonder if this is due to anxiety or to a diet. “All of youze, be available but stay off the street.” He heads for the back door. Julius and Gus follow him. He stops before he disappears into the storage area and turns. “Pauli, lock up. For now, keep out of sight.”

  The rest of us remain frozen until Pauli Bones says, “Get the fuck out of here.”

  In another second we find ourselves on the street, exposed to every passing hit man. Vinnie and his sons are Vlad’s primary targets, but the Russian would happily whack anyone.

  Frankie Hog waddles down the street without a word. He walks with the confidence of a man who has secured a safe situation. At least his bulk protects him from any self-doubt.