Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue

by Mark Kurlansky

  "Not much longer," Felix said in Spanish. "It is not the way the neighborhood is going. There is more of a future in tomatoes than drugs."

  "Tomatoes? You are worried about your fucking tomato business, Mamao?" Limon said menacingly, using the name Felix was known by before he left home. It was Limon's way of reminding him that he knew his family, knew where they lived, knew they were waiting for money from him, which he had stopped sending. The other two smiled nervously, because they were not sure they were supposed to really laugh at this.

  "We are coming back with the shit, Mamao. And you're taking it."

  They left.

  Mamao had a gun. A good gun. Not a Saturday night special. A .38 like the cops had. Or .32, anyway He had never fired it. He was trying to be a grocer. He flipped the egg in the air and caught it, rolled it between his hands to break the shell, peeled it, and ate it.

  Harry was walking up Avenue A, not singing. He was worried about Mordy At the end of the block he saw Nathan hurrying in his direction, and he was about to call out to him when he heard, "Hello, Harry Seltzer."

  He didn't have to turn—didn't want to turn. It was Florence. "I can make you feel good again."

  "No. Look. It was ..."

  'A mistake? Was it a mistake, Harry Seltzer?" Florence laughed, but it was easy for Harry to see desperation on her face and something else. She looked tired. It was, after all, a hard job. But Harry had his own desperation because family was walking toward him.

  "Can't you leave me alone?"

  "Couldn't you just give me a few dollars? Twenty dollars. Just give me a twenty"

  "Here's ten," said Harry, but when he looked in his wallet, he had only twenties, one of which she grabbed.

  "I'll bring you change."

  Nathan was getting closer. "Keep it," he said, not looking at her and quickly walking away

  Nice man, Harry Seltzer, Florence thought.

  Nathan, feeling fragrant in sweat, chocolate, and Karoline, greeted his father and was about to explain why he looked so disheveled, but his father said, "I was just out for a walk. Just enjoying the night air," and did not even seem to notice Nathan's appearance.

  "What's happened to Mordy?" asked Nathan.

  "He's not in jail," said Harry

  "Where is he?" said Nathan.

  "I don't know. The cops had some kind of tip that they were dealing drugs out of his building and they raided it. But they only found one used bag of marijuana. They didn't take him."

  Cabezucha stumbled past them, wild-eyed, his hair looking as if it had been charged with electricity, his head ready to explode.

  "So they didn't press charges," Harry continued. "But the landlord, that son of a bitch Dubinsky who has been trying to get them out for years—this was his perfect excuse to get the police to throw them all out because they are squatters. He had another building of squatters that he set on fire. He is the criminal. He gives Jews a bad name. He plays right into the hands of the anti-Semites. Of course, the cops are anti-Semitic...."

  When Nathan arrived at his building, he took the elevator to the fifth floor and unlocked his door, full of questions, explanations, and digressions. He had run into Harry. Mordy was all right....

  But the apartment was quiet. Was no one home? Was he alone? He felt a familiar panic creeping up his chest, not the panic of a philanderer caught, but that of being trapped in a subway His chest heaved as he exhaled the fear and resuscitated. Sarah was asleep in her bed, completely happy, certain of her safety Sonia was sitting at her writing desk, stiffly, he thought, maybe angrily This stirred the philanderer's breed of panic, but for a man who knew what true panic felt like, this seemed a minor attack.

  Nathan entered the room armed with news of Harry and Mordy, but before he could say anything, Sonia said in a hoarse voice, "Is she attractive?"

  "What?" said Nathan, stalling for an answer.

  "Is she attractive?" Sonia repeated. Then he realized she was looking at something in her hand, a photograph. It was the broad, rough face of Emma Goldman. "Do you think she was attractive?"

  "Not... no, I don't." He was trying to be careful because he still detected something stiff in her posture.

  "She thought she was. And that's all you need. When she was young, she went places a woman alone didn't—unless they were prosti tutes. So men were continually propositioning her because they thought she was a prostitute. But being continually propositioned, for whatever reason, started giving her the notion that men were attracted to her. And I guess it was true, because she always had lovers. Several at a time"

  Sonia was wearing a white shirt, and Nathan noticed dark spots on her back.

  "Ménage à trois and all."

  "You're bleeding!"

  She turned around to face him or to hide her back. "It just goes to show that if you think you are attractive, you are."

  Nathan turned her around. "Why are you bleeding?"

  "It's nothing," she said, turning around again.

  "What happened?"

  "No. Nothing."

  "Was it a customer?"

  "It's nothing."

  "What happened? Did somebody do something?"

  "It's nothing! It's just stupid." She looked at him, and it was clear he would not be satisfied with this. "It's a butterfly."

  "What?"

  "It's a goddamn fucking butterfly. A monarch butterfly."

  "A monarch butterfly."

  "Yes. A stupid fucking monarch butterfly. It was all I could think of. Once when I was little, my parents took me to this valley that was completely covered with these orange butterflies. They were on the branches like blossoms. An orange lawn of them covered the ground."

  "You mean it's a tattoo?" Relieved, he started to smile.

  "Yes, it's a fucking tattoo. Don't you dare laugh, you fucking gringo pendejo. You're the one who said they were sexy."

  "A butterfly?"

  "It was all I could think of."

  "Let me see it."

  "Leave it alone. It's bleeding and it hurts like hell. For a few days. Then it will be nice. Is it stupid?"

  "I don't know."

  "Don't tell your parents, okay?"

  Nathan nodded. "Harry probably thinks monarch butterflies are anti-Semites." Then he thought of another tattoo. A spoon, dripping its contents.... Then he was jolted by a sudden revelation. Karoline must have gotten those handcuffs from Joey Parma!

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Stimulants

  NATHAN AT LAST UNDERSTOOD that a tiny window, not much more than a peephole, was located under his hair near his right temple. When Karoline came very close to him, as she often did before making love or sometimes even when they were lying together afterward, it was not so much to whisper in his ear, not so much because her warm, erotic breath against the side of his face made him want to have her again—though of course she was aware of this effect, also—it was that by being close to him, she could look in the little window and see all his thoughts.

  This discovery made everything clear to Nathan, She knew how much he wanted her, how having her made him want her more, knew everything he was thinking. If he didn't want her to see a thought, he had to avoid thinking it. This kind of thing takes a great deal of discipline. The more you try not to think something, the bigger the thought becomes, the more visible it becomes in the little window.

  He was dreaming about the moist, chocolatey afternoon they made three Sacher tortes. The awkward truth was that at the moment what he most wanted was for Karoline to reach down and undo his zipper and reach inside and hold his penis in her hand. He tried not to think this, which made him think about it more. Or did it make him want it more? Perhaps this wasn't a thought at all. Perhaps all these yearnings for Karoline were feelings that did not involve thinking and therefore could not be seen in the window. Still, deciding whether or not it was a thought was thinking, and Karoline would be able to see that. She saw the thought and so she did it.

  And as the zipper was going down, N
athan suddenly remembered that his penis was made of chocolate. At least it was dark chocolate: 70 percent pure cacao, it had said on the label.

  "Chocolate is never disappointing," she said, clearly able to see that he was thinking she would be disappointed. "It just lacks balance."

  There was some music in the distance, and she stopped laughing and moved close again and lightly wet her lips and said, "I hold you." But she said it in German—"Umschlungen." Why did he always have perfect German when he was asleep?

  "Because you just make it up," she said, answering the thought she had just read. She held him very tightly and started to administer a very engaged kiss, first whispering in a husky voice, "Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!"—This kiss is for all the world! Now he was in the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth:

  Seid umschlungen, Mtllionen. Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!

  Nathan woke up and his feet were flailing, or maybe goose-stepping. It was 9:15. Sarah never woke him up when he wanted her to.

  Sonia was at her desk, writing.

  "Sonia?" Nathan said as he quickly got dressed. "Do you think I would be stupid not to take Ira Katz's offer? Is it stupid for us to pass up the money? For Sarah?"

  Sonia did not look up. "Emma would tell you that you would be stupid to do it. Surrender property to capitalist robber barons. Even Margarita—what would she say? She thought property should be nationalized. But certainly not sold to corporations."

  "I see," Nathan said flatly as he left for his appointment. Emma, Nathan thought, would probably think that we were capitalist robber barons. Does the fact that we aren't any good at it entitle us to moral superiority?

  He opened up the shop late. Carmela started to lean down toward him, and for a second he slipped back into his dream and thought she was leaning down to spy in the little window to his brain. "Cómo 'tá'," was all she said.

  He opened the store so late that he soon had to close it, taking the little bag of pastry he had set aside, and run for the subway. "Getting somediing fixed?" he heard Carmela shout after him. The way he had been feeling, he should have taken a bus. But there was no time. Dr. Kucher started running her clock on the hour whether he was there or not.

  The subway ride did not cause an attack, and he arrived at Kucher's on time, presenting her with "something from the neighborhood. It's called Rigó Jancsi and it's pure chocolate."

  "You shouldn't be bringing me things," said the fluff of hair and pink glasses frames on the other side of the desk. "And you shouldn't eat chocolate."

  "No, it's for you."

  Judging from her furious note taking, it seemed Kucher was getting more from the sessions than Nathan. And his condition was clearly becoming worse. His problem was no longer subways. At any moment, anywhere, he might be overcome with this unapproachable, irreconcilable fear or be gripped with a desire to flee. He had felt it in his own apartment the night before when he first walked in and it seemed empty. "Why shouldn't I eat chocolate?"

  "Stay away from alcohol, coffee, or chocolate. They can aggravate the condition," said the hair and glasses.

  "And apricot preserves?"

  "Apricots? Why apricots?"

  Nathan noticed that Kucher answered every question with another question. He could do that, too. "Why chocolate?"

  "Chocolate is a stimulant. Avoid stimulants. Why do you think of apricots?"

  "They go well with chocolate, don't you think? I was just thinking about Sacher torte."

  "Oh, my God, yes! I love real Sacher torte. When I was a student in Vienna I sometimes had it at Sacher's."

  "Really? And did they do the preserves under the chocolate or split the cake in layers and fill the center?"

  "Well, Sacher's split it, but Demel's used to ..." She tugged at her blouse at the belly. Karoline had left the cake unsplit and had spread the preserves under the chocolate coating. She had said it was more "elegant." She thought Demel's did it right and Sacher's was wrong about their own namesake.

  "We are getting a little off course here," Kucher asserted, trying to change her own direction. And she thought, This one has secrets that he isn't sharing. She told Nathan at the end of the session that he should take the cake.

  "I can't," he said. "It's chocolate."

  After he left, she decided to throw it away. Or give it away to the building staff or to the doorman at home. No, that would mean taking it home. First she wanted to look at it. She questioned her motives but argued to herself that it might contain some clue. Why was he bringing these cakes? She needed to know what kind of cake he was offering. She unwrapped it to look at. He was right. It was all chocolate. Very bad for claustrophobics. Great for everyone else, though. It was a layered square—a chocolate rainbow. A quarter-inch layer of a dark taupe color, then a rosy brown one, then another dark one, then the blackish top, which looked like solid chocolate. Yes, it was like a good, dark chocolate bar.

  Dr. Kucher believed that she had concealed her irritation with Nathan. Even the patient who was trying to be "cool" was a better patient than Nathan. She wanted to point out to Nathan that therapy was futile with the kind of attitude he had. I know this neurotic, passive-aggressive, tied to mom's apron strings, have a cookie wise-ass is holding out on me, Kucher thought. He knows I'm dieting, for one thing. But she did not want to send him away, because he was interesting. Why had he brought up apricots? What did this mean? Cyanide in the pits? Or was it arsenic? She couldn't remember. Had he brought her something with apricots?

  The cake would probably be best in a vertical bite. Oh yes. That was the way it was meant to be eaten. Oh my, yes. Mmmmmm. In one minute the Rigó Jancsi was gone. Dr. Kucher was tugging impatiently at the waistband of her skirt, lost in dreams of student days at Sacher's and Demel's with little layered confections that pressed against great white tides of whipped cream in the fast-darkening Viennese afternoon.

  When Nathan got back to the neighborhood, he had that odd feeling that something had happened. The streets held a tension, almost an excitement. Someone had reached into the wrong garbage can, someone had come into the neighborhood who was not supposed to, it wasn't clear.

  When he saw the three chalk outlines on Tenth Street, one on the sidewalk, two on the street, he knew. Carmela offered more details. Last night, in the cooling breeze down where huge rats scurried from gutter to trash can, where children played on the stoops and, Nathan always feared, would one day be bitten, someone had produced a small handgun and fired about six shots that scattered children and rodents. At first, most people, accustomed to firecrackers, did not react. But there were three men dead, two on the sidewalk and one in the street. By the time everyone realized what had happened, it was too late. No one saw who had fired the gun. The chubby boy with curly black hair, the Fat Finkelstein of his generation, had come back out and to the envy of his friends found one of the shells.

  Nathan knew this about the boy because when he walked onto Tenth Street, instead of immediately running, the pudgy boy came up to him with a closed fist, which he opened briefly to show Nathan the shell. Then he closed his fist again and ran away. Self-preservation had been subordinate, only for an instant, to uncontrollable vanity.

  At home, Nathan was confronted with a bored and restless Sarah. He sniffed the air dramatically. "Sarah. What's that?"

  She stuck her small, turned-up snout in the air and worked it like a spaniel.

  "Sfoglíatella!" he declared, and thought of the delicate pastry crushed under his teeth, making the sound of a minuscule earthquake in his mouth and revealing what is at the center of culture and civilization— warm ricotta cheese. He loved sfogliatella hot out of the oven.

  "From the cookie man?"

  "No," said Nathan with as much energy as he could pump into his answer. "From Sal Eleven."

  "I want to see the cookie man."

  "No sfogliatella?"

  "No. The cookie man." She liked visiting Moellen.

  "Get your mother's apple strudel while you're there," shouted Sonia from the n
ext room.

  "Yes!" said Sarah, jumping out of her chair and half running, half stumbling, like a merry drunkard, to the door.

  They walked to the Edelweiss, along Nathan's block of Tenth Street, where everyone was still talking about the shooting. Considerable curiosity had been stirred up because a police officer had gone into the East Village Gourmet. Most people on the block, including Nathan, thought the man running that store, Felix El Cuquemango, had something to do with the shooting, though the white outlines marking where the body had fallen were not in front of his shop. Nathan did not want Sarah around this. Surprisingly, she had not asked him about the outlines, and he wanted to get her off the block as quickly as possible, even though that meant going directly to the place where he most did not want to be.

  As he walked into the Edelweiss, the only one behind the counter was Karoline's sad-eyed, soft-spoken mother. She nodded politely and said, "Just a minute," and walked noiselessly to the kitchen door. Nathan wanted to leave before she brought out Karoline, but what explanation could he give Sarah? Sarah always required good explanations. He had to be careful, because he thought Sonia was suspicious, and he did not want to do anything that would tell her where to direct her suspicions. And Karoline had threatened to approach his family-knock on the door during dinner. Nathan shuddered like a dog shaking off water. He was never sure what Karoline might do.

  From the kitchen, Nathan could hear the blunt staccato of northern German. Even when awake, he could understand some German from his school studies and because of its similarity to Yiddish, which he also only sometimes understood. Mrs. Moellen seemed to be arguing for her husband to come out and talk to him. He was apparently reluctant, but she argued that he had been wanting to talk to Nathan and this was his opportunity.

  "But you know who he looks like, don't you, Bernsie?" she whispered hoarsely.

  "No, he doesn't, nothing like Viktor."

  "He could be Viktor Stein to look at him!"

  Nathan took Sarah's hand. "Let's come back later," he said. But Sarah sat on the floor, a human anchor to prevent his moving.

  "Hello," came an enthusiastic voice from the kitchen. Too late.