Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue

by Mark Kurlansky

  "They are just the nicest people," said Sonia.

  "And such a nice house," said Nathan.

  "Arts and Crafts," said Sonia.

  "Mission," said Nathan. "Really nice people."

  "They have a television the size of a whole wall," Sarah said.

  "And they probably have a nice house in the country," said Sonia.

  "Yes," said Nathan. "Well have to go there this summer. It will be very nice."

  Both Nathan and Sonia were hoping they could get through the summer without this subject ever coming up again.

  "Maya has a music computer," said Sarah, as though this proved the niceness of it all.

  "Oh, Uncle Mordy will be jealous," said Nathan.

  "Me too!" said Sarah.

  The police had wagons into which they were jamming young people who seemed prepared to be taken quietly.

  "They have a lot of stuff, Sarah," said Sonia. "But you will learn that this is not important."

  "I know," said Sarah, sulking only a little. "But we could use a little more stuff, too," she added, looking up at her mother with a smile successfully calculated to be irresistible.

  "Well," said Nathan, rubbing his head, "we are not going to get pink martinis."

  "Until I grow up," Sarah added.

  "Not even then," Nathan insisted.

  "Okay," said Sarah. "Let's just get stuff!"

  On Ninth Street, a police officer put his badge back on his shirt and rounded the corner to Avenue A, where he interrupted Harry Seltzer in midphrase of an Irving Berlin song. "Hello, Daniel, how are you?" said Harry, who prided himself on knowing everyone's name.

  "Not bad," the officer said pleasantly, fingers tapping the billy club holstered to his belt. "And yourself?"

  CHAPTER NINE

  Egg Creams and Traif

  RUTH AND HARRY had passed essentially the same Saturday night together on Second Avenue for the last fifty years. They had dinner together at Saul Grossman's, then they went to the Yiddish theater, then they walked down to Chaim's for an egg cream, then they walked home. Over the years, certain compromises became necessary.

  They still went to Saul's. But it was no longer filled with their friends from the neighborhood—Esther and the others had moved away or died. In the old days, they didn't have to watch the time. The waiters would make sure they got across the street to the theater before curtain. Sometimes even some of the actors were there. They often saw Menasha Skulnik, and he would greet them in Yiddish.

  Nobody in the restaurant—neither customers nor waiters—spoke Yiddish anymore. Most of the staff weren't even Jewish now, and they were polite, even obsequious. Who could have imagined polite waiters at Saul Grossman's? In the old days, if you ordered pastrami and they had run out of it, the waiter would shout, "Take the corned beef. It's better!" and make the customer feel like the village idiot for having ordered pastrami. Now if they were out of pastrami, they apologized. "I'm terribly sorry, we just ran out of pastrami." The first time a waiter apologized to Ruth, she shook her head and said, "Oh boy." One waiter even introduced himself by name—and his name was Wallace. Soon Saul told him to stop doing that. "You could do us all a big favor, Wallace, and serve the food incognito," said Saul unkindly. At least Saul had not become polite.

  The Yiddish theater had closed and the building was converted to a multiplex cinema with almost a dozen theaters. Harry and Ruth always went to the one that had been the actual theater. There could be a children's movie, or ferocious Asians chopping their way through cities with acrobatic kicks and thrusts, or muscular men winning wars with a dazzling array of firepower. They didn't care. They dressed, and Harry's suit was always perfectly pressed even on the hottest day of the summer. He wore it with a hat, a well-made Italian sisal one in the summer. They took their seats in the balcony, and he took his hat off and rested it on a knee until the lights dimmed. They caressed the ornate walls with their eyes, working slowly up the intricate gilded patterns to the ceiling and finally to the Star of David in the center of the ceiling. Ruth clutched Harry's arm through the movie. This Saturday they saw the big hit of the summer. The posters had been everywhere, featuring a double high-rise tower with smoke pouring from the upper floors and a plane flying into the smoke. There were international terrorists and a smart and determined cop acting courageously and all alone. It didn't matter. They were just there together. All week they fought and belittled each other, but every Saturday night they were in love.

  After the film, walking down Second Avenue, they rarely talked about the movie they had seen, though Harry did ask Ruth what she thought the title, Die Hard, meant. Ruth shrugged and they moved on to better subjects. They talked about the people they had known, some dead, some living somewhere else, many fallen to that horrible Jewish fate, Florida.

  Egg creams were essential. The drink had been in its first bloom of popularity when Harry first moved to New York and they began dating. To Harry, who never knew New York before egg creams, no neighborhood was a true New York neighborhood without them. Since he rarely left the Lower East Side, he didn't realize that this was one of the few neighborhoods where it was still made. Egg creams can survive only as long as there are soda fountains, because bottled soda does not have enough gas to produce the foam on top from which the name is derived. Harry and Ruth always got their Saturday night egg cream at Chaim's, and tried to stick with Chaim's without Chaim. The Koreans still made fairly good egg creams—and a good one is not easy to make. The milk has to be slightly frozen. The milk and chocolate syrup had to be mixed by hand, not machine, and then the jet of soda had to be ricocheted off a spoon to get sufficient foam.

  When Harry finished his chocolate egg cream, he always asked for a little shot of seltzer for the chocolate syrup that remained at the bottom of his cup. But the Koreans wanted to charge twenty-five cents for the extra shot of soda at the end.

  "It's the whole reason I get chocolate. I'd rather have vanilla but there's no syrup at the bottom."

  This was just something he was saying to the Koreans. Harry was a purist and never would have dreamed of any other flavor, because the original egg cream, the real egg cream, was chocolate. Chaim had offered four different flavors and the Koreans had expanded to eight, including blackberry, but drinking a blackberry egg cream was like a blueberry or a raisin bagel—not right.

  Harry missed his extra shot of seltzer and chocolate syrup, which may have been why he called his granddaughter Syrup Cone Seltzer— also because her real name was Sarah Cohn Seltzer. But when Harry complained about having to pay for the extra shot, the Korean smiled, hoping this was some kind of Jewish joke. So they retreated to the only other place that still made egg creams on Avenue A, where they suffered other indignities, being served by Poles who put the egg cream in red paper Coca-Cola cups.

  Nathan and Sonia had their own Saturday night ritual, which they called traif night. Still recovering from Ruth's brisket from the night before, they indulged in oysters, lobster, and a favorite, the prosciutto bread, which was made by all three Sals—a loaf of bread infused with small cubes of traif. On Saturdays they would eat almost any traif— food forbidden by Jewish law Sometimes they would just get ribs from Bob's Greasy Hands. They loved ribs. Saturday night traif was usually carryout food, because if they cooked, they imagined the smells drifting up to Harry and Ruth's apartment above. They thought about this even though they knew Harry and Ruth were always out on Saturday night. They didn't know that Harry had spent the afternoon eating pork fat and gandules with Chow Mein Vega.

  There was no Bob at Bob's Greasy Hands. There was a Pakistani man with a name he always insisted was too difficult. "Call me Bob." He had dark skin and large, soft black eyes, and his smile tripped off so easily that withholding it would have been a disappointment for anyone who knew him. He had a grill on which he cooked ribs, and he offered almost nothing else except corn, which was a later addition when a salesman showed him a machine that steamed the corn and kept it permanently warm—also perma
nently soggy, but no one cared because Bob's had the best ribs in the neighborhood. In truth there was only one other rib place in the neighborhood, a strange chain restaurant that had settled on Second Avenue with the arrival of tourists who wanted to go to the East Village. But Bob's had good ribs to go. No one actually ate there. Nighttime and Cuquemango draped themselves in the two aluminum chairs that were too small to attract diners, drinking Cokes out of cans, taking a short break from selling smoke on a Saturday night.

  Sarah was already asleep—with visions of "stuff" no doubt dancing in her head—and Nathan was getting the ribs and renting a movie. He and Sonia had had a fight, which may have been the last traces of the pink martini. He wanted to rent Algiers, and Sonia said she could not watch it again, and Nathan pointed out that they had seen the documentary on Emma Goldman five times. Sonia insisted that was for work. When there was a fight they rented The Red Desert and watched fleshy Italians roll on the floor with too much air pollution to have sex. There was something oddly appealing about this, and they had seen it more times than the Goldman documentary and Algiers combined.

  As Nathan walked into Bob's, Nighttime, who had ten gold rings in his left ear, dark gold to match the ring on his finger and the cap on one front tooth, was talking to Bob, while Cuquemango was staring at the ceiling fan as though thinking of hanging himself. "Cabezucha got some money and he's fucked up again. Mira, the man is out of it. Sabe, he just asks anybody. Cops, neighbors. He doesn't care, tu sabe'. Una ve'—vi this fucking cop coming down First. Puñeta, I shout the alarm. Y no' vamo'. I look up First, you know, then I turn back and the street is vacío, empty, man, se fueron todo, the only motherfucker on Tenth Street is stupid Cabezucha, man, standing there in the medio bloque, sabe, with his big cabeza, saying, 'Smoke?' "

  "Ah," said the man who was not Bob. "You should be very careful. This neighborhood is getting difficult." He smiled. Nathan ordered his ribs. Nighttime did not seem to want to continue talking, but the man who was not Bob did not appear to care about Nathan and just went ahead. "You have to be more careful. There is trouble coming," he said with an even bigger smile. "It is that German. You know the German?" he said to Nathan as he took his ribs order. Nathan nodded. "He is a real Nazi."

  "How do you know that?" Nathan asked.

  "He does not like people of color. He is out to get us each and every one. A typical Nazi."

  "You're just saying that because he's German."

  The man who was not Bob smiled. "No. He is SS. A colonel in the SS. Ask him."

  Nathan took his ribs and on the way home pondered what it would be like to be German, how he had mishandled that evening with Karo-line years ago, how he wished it had gone differently...

  Nathan and Sonia ate the ribs and watched the fleshy Italians rolling around. Just as the actors were about to not have sex, there was a knock on the door. It was Harry. "We got you some liver knishes," he said. Did he intentionally intrude on traif night?

  "They're good," Harry pleaded. "Not from Yankel Fink."

  "Dad, what am I going to do with all these liver knishes?"

  "Give them to Syrup Cone for a treat."

  "Sarah hates liver."

  "Even chopped liver?"

  "Any liver."

  Harry threw up his hands in despair and bobbed his head in that "I told you so" nod to God. "See that? She's not Jewish. Sonia, you are raising a Mexican."

  "I've got good news for you, Harry," said Sonia. "I tried to give her an enchilada. We had carryout Mexican. You know what she said? She looked at the enchiladas and said, 'Blintzes, yuck.' "

  "I'm going to bed," said Harry.

  "She likes German chocolate and Italian olives. No chopped liver," said Nathan.

  "She's four years old and already exhibits a soft spot for Fascist cultures."

  "Three years old, Dad."

  "That's better? To be pro-Fascist at three? So why don't you bring her by and we can play. I want some fun in my old age. Listen, it is supposed to be a hundred degrees tomorrow. Go see Uncle Nusan."

  "All right. Did you hear any more about Rabbinowitz?"

  "Something, isn't it. Guy walks up to someone right on the street and shoots them and nobody knows who did it."

  Nathan heard Harry muttering on his way up the stairs, "How can anyone not like chopped liver?" and he wondered if Harry knew they had been eating ribs.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Whose Bumpy Road Is It?

  HARRY HAD A SNAPSHOT of Nusan slipped into the frame of a mirror over his dresser. It was not the mirror he shaved in every morning, but it was almost that. It was the mirror he inspected his shave in, the mirror he straightened his shirt in. Even though he had no office, nowhere to go, really, Harry dressed every morning in a fresh starched shirt. He loved the stiffness of them, the way they looked like an unstarted day, a fresh skin. He had always imagined that when he got married his wife would iron and starch shirts for him. But long before they got near a chuppah, Ruth had announced, "I am not doing shirts," and said it in a way that was non-negotiable. She had noticed Harry's shirt habit, and it was not going to be her life's work. So he got them done at a 20 percent discount from the Chinese man in exchange for a rent deal on a storefront in his Tenth Street building.

  As Harry put on his stiff, crisp shirt and straightened it in the mirror, he would always see the snapshot of his brother, Nusan, weighing about eighty pounds in a baggy suit on a street in Paris, wearing a smile without the least hint of humor in it.

  Nathan was sure that Nusan had come to New York because his brother was there. Nusan always referred to Harry as "my brother," and if he was angry, if he was having a bad day, he would add the phrase "my only living relative," which always perplexed Nathan, since he was Nusan's blood nephew.

  Since both brothers grew up speaking Yiddish, it would have been logical that they still spoke Yiddish to each other. But they didn't. They didn't speak very much to each other at all. When they did, it was usually in English. When Nusan did speak Yiddish, it was only to mutter a phrase, some idiom that was more a riddle than a statement.

  He frequently grumbled to his brother, "Aach, tokhes oyfn tish." Literally, this means "ass on the table," and if it had any meaning beyond that, Nathan never learned it. When Nusan said it to him, Nathan would nod in response as though it were irrefutable.

  Nusan made clear that he thought Harry lived a comfortable life of which he disapproved. But this was more an expression of Nusan's resentment than the cause of it. It seemed as though Nusan wanted to be poor to upset his brother. And it did upset Harry that Nusan was living in a sixth-floor walk-up studio apartment on Rivington Street on the air shaft, a cluttered little cave that he had settled into when he arrived in New York. His rent was now up to less than $60 a month, which probably made it one of the cheapest apartments in Manhattan.

  Harry kept trying to give Nusan a better apartment. Harry told him it was an investment. "You'll be doing me a favor," he argued. "With the tax break I'll be making money"

  But Nusan always had the same strange answer: "I do not take blood money." If Harry knew what he meant by this, no one else did. When Nathan was younger, he assumed that his father was looking after Nusan. But as he got older, it became apparent to Nathan when he went to see his uncle how alone he was, how grateful he was for the company, for someone to go out with. Gradually Nathan realized that Nusan was his responsibility Harry never complained, never said anything about it, but he probably did not enjoy Nusan's company, the blood money references, the other hostile statements. Yet Nusan's photograph was tucked in his mirror.

  There was a lot Nathan and Mordy didn't know. Almost nothing had been explained to them. Nathan was not even sure how he knew that Nusan was a camp survivor. It seemed as if he'd been born knowing it. Can knowledge become coded in DNA? Will knowledge of the Holocaust become genetically encoded? Worse, will the experience? Will Jews genetically know the Holocaust the way salmon know the river of their birth?

  The building on
Rivington Street where Nusan lived had a smell of fried food and sweat and sometimes cats. The Dominicans had brightened the neighborhood with the blue and red squares of their flag, enlivened it with restaurants serving hot island food, made it bounce with their brassy merengue music splashing out of windows. Gang insignias were sprayed on the walls of Nusan's building and the walls of the Portuguese grocer across the street who had been there before the Spanish people. An unreadable swirling design in spray paint blocked the view from the wire-reinforced glass entrance to Nusan's building. Once the door to Nusan's apartment was opened, a different, overpowering, unidentified smell took over. It may have been just sour air. Even on the hottest summer days, when the old air conditioners in the other apartments were all rumbling and coughing like the distant sound of a busy small-craft airstrip, Nusan had his windows shut, Brahms swelling and the Mets striking out.

  Nusan saw a synchronism between the dark, somber, Germanic tones of Brahms and the lineup of the New York Mets as they loaded the bases and failed to drive in a run or lost a winning game by an error through the legs. As summer began, they were still in first place in the National League East, but Nusan, with a connoisseur's eye for tragedy, could see the flaws that would doom them. The tall and goofy Darryl Strawberry would lope to the plate and pound the ball out of the park. But Nusan noticed that he hit like that only when the bases were empty. With runners in scoring positions he tended to strike out, revealing a hidden will to fail in spite of his enormous ability. Sportswriters said that he felt the weight of carrying the entire ball club. But Nusan knew this was simply a built-in desire to fail, just as Nusan saw Dwight Gooden's fate awaiting him, even while he pitched shutout innings, in interviews in which he denied using drugs.

  The Mets were ill-fated champions. The Yankees had less talent and of late fewer victories, and for the moment the championship was eluding them. But they would be back because they thought like champions, walked with the blessing of winners. Nusan could never be a Yankees fan.