Debasements of Brooklyn

by Ira Gold

  I nod.

  “And stop doing that!”

  I keep my body totally still. When one is in the mood to misinterpret, the most innocent twitch can cause offense.

  She can’t contain herself, “I have to know . . . have you read a lot of Aristotle?”

  “Some. His thing on poetry.”

  “The Poetics?” Ariel seethes. “You read the Poetics? You jerk.” And with that she stomps back up the stairs.

  It’s hardly my fault. Not only is Aristotle the second most influential philosopher in history, but his name begins with an “A,” which means he is one of the first writers my father bought in his alphabetical attack on the Western canon. He’s been on the shelf my whole life.

  With Ariel gone again, I consider whether she has a point. Had I tricked her? Maybe unconsciously. No harm done. She appreciated the opportunity to school me in the ways of the sophisticates.

  Meanwhile, I need to decide about Vinnie.

  We are all soldiers. We see ourselves as warriors who happen to be trapped in a feminized, corporatized age where the poets no longer celebrate certain types of mano-a-mano viciousness. Small tribes battling for micro territory is considered an annoyance by the global players who see only continent-wide domination a true measure of manhood. Backstabbing, fear mongering, and access to a nuclear arsenal have replaced courage in the face of fire for both leaders and followers. Any schnook on the front lines is treated with contempt by the Vinnies in political office and the Vlads on the general staff.

  Back to Ariel. Never go to sleep angry at your lover so I debate going upstairs to apologize. What the hell is the matter with her? So I read the fucking Poetics. So what? Aristotle, as far as I know, belongs to world culture, not just to those who lord their intellectual superiority over others for a living.

  But before I can make a move I hear Ariel coming down the stairs again. I’m mollified. Pleased. Maybe she even set up this fight so we can make up with some bloody sex. I think of the ropes and paddles and dildos. I just hope she doesn’t want me to cut her. Once a girl asked me to slice her breast and I turned her down flat. Call me a prude but I don’t like blood, even the blood of cute chicks. Yet right now, if Ariel gives me a blade, I’ll slice her in half if she so desires.

  But when I see Ariel, I realize that if she did have a knife she’d use it to gut me. She grabs the vodka from under the bed and stomps back upstairs.

  I watch her go and tell myself that under no circumstance can I ever discuss Montesquieu. If she finds out that I enjoyed the Persian Letters she’d never forgive me.

  31

  Makeup Test

  I fall asleep contemplating the French Revolution. That often happens when I’m under pressure. I think of the great Enlightenment Philosophes and wish I had lived during that time—not in France, where the Reign of Terror and the verb conjugation would have killed me. One either participates in the terror or becomes its victim. I have enough of that in my current life. I would like to have lived in England and contemplated the instinct for political freedom and self-determination à la Edmund Burke from a safe distance. People who like to be at the heart of the action have never been at the heart of the action. Our most pointless wars are fought under presidents who have never served in the military.

  Anxieties of being a great coward gnaw me awake.

  I would die for causes in which I believe. Maybe. I used to knock people around when they didn’t come up with the necessary payments. In those situations I sometimes stopped my partner—an efficient gangster like Pauli Bones—from committing permanent harm to the mark. (And he let me stop him. I sometimes think Pauli Bones might not be as crazy as he lets on.)

  I care about too many things, including my victims.

  As a kid, callow, I gave no fuck. It’s only after I got into my father’s books that I developed this tic, this hesitation. It doesn’t matter that the novels I most enjoy are skeptical and allergic to sentiment. They still make me homesick for times and places in which I never lived. (As if I don’t have enough headaches by being so stupidly attached to this asswipe neighborhood.) Is it possible that a moral education actually makes you moral? How can that be? The Nazis worshipped Beethoven and Heidegger loved Hitler as much as he did Plato.

  Can empathy hit one like a sledgehammer descending from the clouds?

  I check the time. It’s two in the morning. I slept for two hours, long enough for insomnia to strike for the next five.

  In circumstances like these, I always enjoy doing something stupid. So I put on my jacket and slip out the door. The streetlight in front of Ariel’s house is out and there’s no moon, making the darkness comfortingly thick. I pull a joint from my pocket. Just holding the skiff between my fingers relaxes me. I’ve been getting high since I was twelve. The bud never disappoints. Like a good mother, it quiets whatever cruel demons are poking at you.

  I start feeling better. Whatever happens, happens. If I survive, things will work out. If I die, than nothing else matters. Calmly, I dream of killing everyone—Vlad, Crazy Bo, Vinnie. I’ll kill Pauli Bones and IRA and my friend Ivan the Slavic Chauvinist. My homicidal musings stop short of my family and Ariel, but not of myself. A Glock 9 and a thirty-round clip can accomplish much in a very short time.

  Time stops as the cannabis circulates in my system. Why suffer the slings and arrows? Over the last 400 years we have answered the question that so baffled the Bard: it’s not worth it. There’s nothing out there. Yet this powerful insight doesn’t help. One still hallucinates oneself into meaning and purpose. But on nights like this, when the dogs of war bark, when pity is frozen in every heart, when intellectual disgrace blots every face, a general slaughter makes the most sense.

  “What are you doing?” Ariel purrs.

  I drag on the joint and offer it behind me. She still has not shown herself.

  Ariel takes it and I hear her inhale. “Wow.”

  For personal use, I only roll the most medicinal hydroponic product. It never fails to blast one out of his/her shoes.

  “You must be standing in the dark and answering the big questions: the nature of time, what happens after death, what is this phenomenon we call reality.”

  “You’re drunk,” I tell Ariel.

  “You bet your psycho ass,” Ariel replies. “What else have you read that you haven’t told me about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit. Liar.”

  “Why ask me if you’re just going to get angry? If things work out like I hope, we’ll have plenty of times for long, intelligent discussions.”

  “I need to know the depth of your deception.” She waits before she asks, too loudly for this quiet night on this quiet block, “Have you written anything Mister Philosopher Gangsta? Have you connected the disparate parts of your life into some hard-boiled intellectual tract?”

  “Do you really think I’d put something down on paper? Risk everything for what? Not that anyone reads anymore, but still . . . Let’s go inside.” I turn and see her standing barefoot on the cement. She’s wearing nothing but the sleeveless nightie. Now the belt she wanted me to whip her with is stylishly cinched around her waist.

  I sweep her off her feet and carry her inside. As we’re entering she pulls the joint from the edge of my mouth and flips it away. “My mother can still smell like a bloodhound.”

  I put her down on the bed. The nightgown rides up and I stare at her red thong. She spreads her thighs and mutters, “Come on. I don’t care if you’ve memorized all of Kierkegaard.”

  “You’re too drunk.”

  “So? You’re too educated. Much more unforgivable.”

  “I never finished high school,” I defend myself.

  “It doesn’t matter. I always knew you had secrets. But I thought it had to do with putting bodies through meat grinders, not familiarity with the classics.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not really your fault,” Ariel sniffles. “I’m just a fool. No matter how many times I’m w
rong, I still think I’m a good judge of character. Why do I attract these . . .” She sobs, “Why did you let me make such a dope of myself?”

  I feel for Ariel, this mostly naked girl lying down with her knees bent apart. I kneel on the bed and push the G string away from her crotch. It takes another second to pull my dick from my pants and gently penetrate. For the first time we use no condom.

  We move in rhythm from the start and soon she comes with an explosiveness that almost rivals the time I tied her up for an hour. But she orgasms only once and then she pushes me off.

  After her breathing returns to normal she says, “Don’t tell me you didn’t use a rubber.”

  I don’t respond. She knows I hadn’t.

  “Wonderful.” She reaches under the bed. “Where the hell is the vodka?”

  “You took it upstairs.”

  “Oh.”

  “Why do you drink so much?”

  She crawls into my arms. “Because it helps control my drug use. And if I did nothing, I wouldn’t fulfill a single fantasy. I trade my liver for erotic fulfillment.”

  “So you have your own secrets,” I say. “You pretend to be totally straitlaced, but you’re really an outlaw. By the way, can you get pregnant?”

  “Why do men always ask the same stupid question? I am a woman. We’re usually the ones who give birth. But we should be okay.”

  Our fight recedes and our relationship strengthens. Ariel leans her head on my shoulder. “Technically, you know, we have more in common now than we did before.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not yeah. Yes. We do. And I’m not saying it’s a good thing. But we have to explore each other anew.”

  “Sure.”

  “Not sure. I’m serious. You’re more of a person. I just can’t have you whipping me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t.” Ariel falls back on the bed and begins a half-drunken weeping. “Maybe it’s not you. It’s me. I just don’t know myself well enough to allow . . . for this . . .”

  I no longer fit into the fantastical dream world Ariel created from mannerisms and hair gel. I’m not the savage retard that originally so aroused her.

  I really must get going. But I have five minutes. “Lie down with me.”

  She topples onto the pillow and we scrunch together on the narrow bed. She falls asleep with the bare bulb burning over her eyes. I make a note to myself: my girlfriend is an alcoholic.

  32

  Mother Fucking Courage

  The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. 1929. Al Capone took over all the bootlegging in Chicago after whacking seven leading lights of Bugsy Moran’s gang. The lucky seven were lined up by men in police uniforms and machine-gunned in a warehouse. A few years later, Lucky Luciano, in a single glorious slaughter, whacked the entire old guard of Mustache Pete in New York and ushered in the modern family structure that propelled New York to the top of the rackets. The five-boss Commission has ruled over every aspect of wise guy life ever since. Sure, the power of each family waxes and wanes, but extremely organized crime will be here as long as people are people and corporations are people.

  But will the Italian Mafia survive? In Italy, sure. Despite competition from recent immigrant groups like the Serbs and the Albanians, the ’Ndrangheta and other Sicilian gangs are well entrenched at every level of law enforcement and government. As much as the Italians hate the Italian Mafia, they hate the foreign gangs worse. Like good citizens everywhere, they feel if they are going to be terrorized, let it be by paisans, homegrown boys who themselves are deeply dedicated to keeping Italy Italian.

  Here in America, however, immigrants change the face of the nation every generation. One wave swamps the previous one. Italian migration receded decades ago, leaving only the restaurants in its wake. A few holdout ethnic neighborhoods exist, like here and in Bensonhurst. But we’re islands in a sea of Russians, Pakistanis, Chinese, and Dominicans. Like immigrant groups before them, many barely speak English and aggressively huddle in their neighborhoods. They have unity and the profound contempt of authority so necessary for criminal activity to dominate an economy.

  Vinnie Five-Five and his little crew are ruthless enough gangsters, but only a tiny segment of their community remains behind them. Despite the century of Cosa Nostra tradition, we are out on a limb without the necessary societal approval that gives us the resources, not to mention the confidence, to fight off the Feds and the newer gangs.

  So why am I going to die for this marginal character?

  Ariel snores gently but loud enough to disconcert. I imagine her a bit older, a bit heavier, a bit drunker. The gift of daintiness is not given to those careless of it.

  She needs to move out of her mother’s place. Maybe she should come to the end of the world with me.

  I rearrange Ariel on the bed and cover her with the blanket. Her breathing lightens and she mutters a sweet, happy nothing.

  I go to the computer. I will not spend my last night surfing financial sites or porn. I do, however, check night vision goggles. Just as I suspected, it takes experience to use them correctly. It seems like Vinnie is doing a Jonestown, giving his crew night vision Kool-Aid.

  I slip out again. More than anything I want to see Judith and her girls, but I dare not go to her in-laws’. John poisoned that well a long time ago; they see me as an insane fool who brings only trouble on the family.

  They are right about everything.

  On McDonald Avenue the elevated F train tracks loom. My father hated this train. “Takes forever to get into the city. Who needs it?” Why the hell did Dad place such an inordinate premium on having quick access to Manhattan? His bookie worked out of the corner candy store and his job took him no farther than Midwood. Had he seen our elevated lines as underground railroads to freedom? Had he, too, dreamed of escaping the rackets, the accounting, his gambling addiction? Like so many misfit Brooklyn boys of his generation, he imagined a life of the mind, elegant, full of art and argument, beauty and passion. He would have delighted in the disappointment of knowing the wisest men and wittiest women in the land. In Manhattan he could escape the prison of his destiny.

  So why hadn’t he ever acted? Was he worried that he wouldn’t be able to take us with him? He loved his kids; that I know. And my mother, his wife, would have found nothing of interest outside the places in which she spent her childhood. She went into Manhattan twice a year, exclusively to shop at a Macy’s sale. Or maybe Dad didn’t give a flying fuck about the city and he just had a stupid, pointless subway obsession.

  You can never know about these things.

  I touch the Glock under my coat. Its metallic solidity comforts me. Where am I going? On the corner of Dahill Road, I see a red neon sign that blinks Bob’s. It’s a bar, but metal shutters cover the window. No wonder. It is three A.M.

  Farther into Bath Beach the buildings turn smaller, less forbidding, more residential, with one exception. I have reached Vinnie Five-Five’s house. We call the place The Fortress.

  Vinnie could have moved to New Jersey. His relatives would have let him keep his rackets, given him more territory. But for some reason he chose to stay in a place that his grandfather moved to in 1945. The outside of the house hasn’t been altered in seventy years.

  It’s a strange house, built to be a bunker. It sits in the center a triangular plot of land. The wall facing the street is solid stone. The only opening to the wider world is a slit in the attic room where one can watch the entrance while aiming an M-16 at the street below. In the back, the windows face a garden that Vinnie’s wife cultivates with Voltairean zeal. A ten-foot cinder block wall keeps neighbors from appreciating all the energy Mrs. Five-Five puts into her azaleas.

  Here is the seat of the Five-Five Empire. Here Vinnie’s grandfather plotted, unsuccessfully, on becoming a captain in the Bonanno family. Here Vinnie’s brother Gregory fulfilled his grandfather’s dream before suffering from the unfortunate experience of being whacked. And here Vinnie runs the operation.
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  I stare, somewhat amazed at having materialized in this spot. It seems that I just wandered over, but it is impossible for that to be true. One doesn’t aimlessly arrive at The Fortress. Nor does one examine the building with a ferocity of gaze that alone could incinerate it.

  We played here—Julius, Augustus, me—all the time. Video games, cops and robbers. As long as the cops were killed, we had the run of the house. I ate dinner here a thousand times: ziti, meatballs, Mrs. Five-Five’s veal. I was watching TV with the twins when Vinnie shot Chris Cupcake in the back of his head as he went to check out Vinnie’s new hot water heater. Vinnie thought he was a rat. Murdering people in your own home is not standard practice, but it does have the advantage of convenience.

  Twenty years ago, I learned a narrow tunnel led from the basement to the garage. Using the logic acquired from years of serious reading, I deduced that the same tunnel led from the garage to the basement.

  Of course, as a nonfamily member, as a nonmade guy, as a half-Jew and as wholly ambivalent, I was not supposed to know about this. But ten-year-old boys with stunted imaginations can never keep secrets. Both Gus and Julius, separately, led me to the tunnel. They had stumbled upon this entrance by crawling around some built-in cabinets in the basement while looking for a good place to hide in ambush. They liked doing that, bursting out of the closets with fake guns and real fists. Eventually, after discovering that they both told me about it, we incorporated the tunnel into our games as long as Vinnie was not home.

  Now Julius is gone. Now Gus is a stranger. Now Vinnie doubts my reliability. But the tunnel remains.

  In the left corner of the garage’s back wall, secreted in what looks like solid cinder block, is a hinge. A simple push and the fake cinder block pops up and creates a space large enough for a grown man to slip through. An enterprising gangster with a car stashed nearby could be fifty miles outside of the city by the time his enemies realize that he is not hiding in the house. The whole setup is a miraculous feat of Mafia contracting.