Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue

by Mark Kurlansky

  "It's not birds," she pleaded. "The dog is going to die!"

  "What dog?"

  Mrs. Nagel touched the center of her chest as she tried to gather herself, seemingly more out of breath than Harry "Three C is away for a week. Boca Raton. Why? What is it with Boca Raton?"

  "I don't know." Harry started to walk toward the next set of stairs. If he did not appear soon, Florence would take the elevator back up and sound his door buzzer.

  "Wait!" shouted Birdie Nagel in such a commanding voice that it stopped him. "The dog! I said I would feed the dog. The keys don't work!"

  Harry looked longingly down the staircase and then took the keys from her hand and walked to 3C and opened the door. "You just have to jiggle the key a little."

  "It needs a new lock. This dog could have died." The front hallway to the apartment had little piles of droppings, and an anxious little white fluffy animal was trying to climb Harry's leg.

  "It's not the lock," said Harry "It's the key. Someone made a bad copy."

  "Oh, thank God, thank God," said Birdie Nagel, embracing the dog. "Here, help me. Open my door. I am going to keep the dog with me."

  Harry got the fluffy dog and Birdie Nagel back into her apartment. "God bless you, Mr. Seltzer. Lang lebn," she said, wishing him a long life.

  "That's all right," said Harry, anxious to leave.

  "Wait a minute!" She disappeared into her apartment and returned with a twenty-pound sack of birdseed. "It's for the birds. I can't feed them with the dog. I asked my neighbor, that new boy you rented to. The fardarter. No, he's too busy. That's the best you could rent to? That fardarter. They bury better-looking people...."

  Harry saw the elevator coming back up and grabbed the birdseed and ran to push the button. When the elevator door opened, he stepped in without even acknowledging the impatient Florence, apparently en route to destroy his life. "Bye, Mrs. Nagel," he said as the doors closed.

  When the door opened on the second floor, the new tenant, the fardarter himself in seersucker, stepped in.

  "Hello, Mr. Seltzer, I have a problem," said the new tenant. Harry couldn't help thinking that Birdie Nagel was right about him, he was a fardarter, a withered, dull young man. "I am having trouble getting cable TV The cable company said that the building has never been wired. No one has ever had cable TV here? How is that possible?"

  "I don't know. It never came up. There is a very nice theater on Second Avenue, a multiplex. They chopped up a beautiful old theater and now you have a choice of six movies." The elevator opened to the ground floor and Harry fled to the door and would have made it if it hadn't been for Mrs. Kleinman.

  "Mrs. Kleinman, I know nothing about the postal service. There is nothing I can do."

  "I am not talking about the postal service," she said indignantly. "I am talking about my gas line."

  "I'm sorry. What is wrong with your gas line?"

  "I am charged five dollars a month for gas and I never use my stove."

  "But that doesn't have anything to do with me either."

  "I know It's the man who reads the meter. But don't you see?"

  "What?"

  "He's the one who's been stealing my mail!"

  "I've got to go." He started to walk out of the building with Florence following behind.

  "Please, Mr. Seltzer. I have to get my mail."

  "I'm sorry, Mrs. Kleinman, I will try to figure this out for you."

  "You promise, Mr. Seltzer?" Somehow the order had gotten mixed up and Mrs. Kleinman found herself behind Florence, shouting at her instead of Harry Florence smiled politely and backed away.

  "I promise, Mrs. Kleinman, I will work on the postal problem. But not right now."

  "May you live to a hundred, Mr. Seltzer," Mrs. Kleinman shouted at him as he scurried down Avenue A, Florence at a discreet distance struggling to match his pace.

  He was almost at the cash machine at First Avenue when a tough-looking, dark-skinned man with no shirt and several rings in his right ear stopped him. "Are you Harry Seltzer?"

  "I can't believe it."

  "Believe what?"

  "I am Harry Seltzer."

  "So why is that hard to believe?"

  "What do you want?" said Harry, his manners at last fraying.

  "I am Wilson Morelos," the young man declared with great drama.

  Harry could not find a response.

  "The merengue trumpet player."

  "Ohh, wonderful. Where are you playing?"

  "That's just it. I was told you could find me a booking."

  "Who do you play with?"

  "I thought you could help me."

  Harry looked back at Florence, resting against a brick building like a tired but determined hunter. Even from a distance, he could see the sweaty shine of her face and skin. But she was determined to follow. "Talk to Chow Mein Vega."

  "He doesn't do merengue. He said to talk to you."

  "Do you have a phone number?"

  "I'll write it down for you. Do you have a piece of paper and a pen?" Harry found a scrap of paper, the back of someone else's card in his wallet. But he had no pen. He was standing by a newsstand. "Can I borrow a pen a minute?" he asked the vendor.

  "Are you buying a newspaper?"

  Harry started to reach into his wallet and realized he was still carrying twenty pounds of birdseed. Then he remembered that he had given Florence all his money He looked at the young man, who reached fatalistically into the low-slung empty pockets of his baggy pants. "Florence," he called after her, and she started to back off nervously He coaxed her like a deer, and when she was finally near him he said, "I just need some money for a newspaper."

  "You know I don't have any money."

  "The fifteen dollars."

  "What fifteen dollars?"

  "Oh, God. Listen, Wilson." No one ever had to give their name more than once to Harry. "Wilson, I am going to a cash machine. Come with me. I'll get some money and buy a paper and use his pen and you can give me your phone number."

  "Gracias, man."

  "Yeah."

  So Harry continued toward the cash machine, birdseed in hand, with the lean and shirtless horn player Wilson behind him, and Florence behind Wilson, and, Harry thought, maybe Mrs. Kleinman behind her. The wide avenues of bright lights giving off orange haze as they refracted in the humidity were crowded with people in the warm summer night, but the narrow side streets were dark and silent and their footsteps clopped loud as horse hooves.

  About to round the corner to the cash machine, he nearly ran into Cabezucha, who suddenly appeared, looking very large, his eyes barely fitting in his head, bloated and tense like a tire with too much air. Harry did not notice this, did not notice the wild-eyed way this large man looked at him, like a hungry animal eyeing prey, almost licking his chops. Harry only remembered his previous encounter with the man, because Harry prided himself on remembering previous encounters. "You see, you didn't listen to me," Harry scolded in a friendly way. "The cash machine doesn't give change. Now here I am without a dime to give you."

  Cabezucha stared at Harry helplessly.

  "I am going to get cash, but it will all be twenties. And I can't give you a twenty" He reached up, patted the giant on his back, and walked past him. Wilson followed uneasily. Florence did not dare.

  Harry got the money, all twenties. Wilson was waiting for him outside, but he could not find Florence when he came out, and in any event, he did not want Wilson to see him giving Florence money. He decided to walk back to the newsstand with Wilson, buy a paper, and borrow a pen, but on the way back he found Florence in her blue dress hunched over the sidewalk in the position of a Muslim praying.

  "Florence, are you all right?!"

  "Yes, I am all right, Harry Seltzer." She smiled and struggled to stand up.

  "She's a junkie, man," said young Wilson Morelos.

  "Here, let me give you some money," said Harry, not at all interested in Wilson's assessment. "Here, take sixty. Will sixty be okay?"

&nb
sp; Florence nodded her head yes but then said, "I'll never get home with it unless you walk me. Cabezucha will get me."

  "Who is Cabbage Suit Ya?"

  "It's that guy," said Wilson. "He saw her get the money from the corner. He'll get her. Too easy to pass up."

  "I know him from the neighborhood," Harry protested. "He's wearing a Dukakis button. Look!"

  "Shit, look at that!" said Wilson, and Harry thought he was referring to the campaign button on Cabezucha's T-shirt. But Wilson reached down to the sidewalk near where Florence had fallen and picked up a silvery ballpoint pen. "Here, let me write my number."

  But juggling the birdseed, his wallet, and his banking card, Harry had somehow misplaced the business card where he was going to write Wilson's telephone number.

  "Here, man, give me your arm," said Wilson, and he wrote the seven figures on Harry's forearm and then seemed eager to be off to brighter parts of the neighborhood.

  Harry did not want to be seen walking Florence, but he had no choice. Crossing Seventh Street, Florence said, "It's all right, he's not following."

  But Harry was not thinking about Cabezucha. He was watching a gaunt, angry-looking man with a craggy face, who was carrying a large, black plastic garbage bag. Harry noticed the fury in the man's eyes as he walked up to Harry with an almost violent deliberateness and shouted, "I pay my taxes!" He seemed frozen, waiting for Harry's response.

  "I know what you mean. I pay mine. Florence pays hers, too. Don't you, Florence."

  The man glared at Florence, waiting for a response.

  "I'm pretty much off the books." She could see from the glowing eyes deep in his rough-hewn face that this was not the right answer. But he was willing to wait for it.

  "I pay my taxes, too," Florence said weakly. The man nodded agreement and walked to the curb, where he stuck a long arm into the garbage and began groping around with a quick professional touch in search of retrievable items.

  "Are you sure you're all right?" Harry asked Florence.

  She ran her fingers lightly through Harry's thick white hair. "You are a nice man, Harry Seltzer."

  Harry, not especially believing her pronouncement, looked at his watch and saw that he had been gone from dinner for forty-five minutes. He hurried down the street, nearly running, which was not easy to do with twenty pounds of birdseed.

  Waiting in the lobby for the elevator, the seersucker fardarter seemed to be having a fight with his girlfriend.

  "What's wrong with seersucker?" whined the fardarter.

  "It's not exactly a power suit," she said.

  The elevator arrived, and they and Harry stepped in.

  "It's a way of saying 'Even if it's ninety degrees, I'm still here with my pinstripes.' "

  "Yes, but at what price?" she said as they got off at their floor. As the elevator was closing, Harry heard him protest, "I got it at Syms!"

  "That's not what I meant."

  A full hour late, Harry burst through the door, exhausted. Dinner was finished, and Mordy and Priscilla had left. Sonia had fallen asleep on the couch. Sarah was playing with Nusan in the stuffed armchair. While Nathan and Ruth looked on in horror, Sarah was insisting that "Nusey," as she sometimes called him, recite the numbers on his arm. And Nusan was playfully engaged in the game. It had started when she asked why he had the numbers and he had explained that it was a number he was trying to remember. And so she was testing him.

  Suddenly she shouted, "Grandpa has one, too!" and pointed at Harry's arm. Not realizing that Nusan had used the same explanation, Harry said, "No, that's just a number I had to remember."

  Ruth, seeing the birdseed, said, "Oh, you got stuck with Birdie Nagel!"

  "Yes, she was complaining about the new tenant. You know what she called him? A seersucker fardarter."

  "I don't care if he is a fardarter," Ruth said expressively "As long as he is a rent-paying fardarter!"

  The words suddenly woke Sonia. "What? What did you say?"

  Ruth repeated, "I said I don't care if he is a fardarter, as long as he is a rent-paying fardarter."

  "Yes!" Sonia said triumphantly, and she wrote something in her notebook.

  "Is there any strudel left?" asked Harry

  "Nathan made kugelhopf tonight. It's very good. We saved you a piece." Ruth took a plate with a piece of yellow cake dusted with sugar and slid it across the table toward him.

  "Why don't we get apple strudel anymore?" asked Harry. Then, without warning, he raised his hand over his head and slammed it on the table, making a loud thump that startled the half-asleep Sonia, spilled coffee into saucers, and overturned his piece of kugelhopf He seemed to have thrown the cake on the floor in anger, which was not the way Harry acted. Everyone looked at him in silent shock. Sarah was motionless, studying the scene with fascination.

  "God, I hate these things," Harry said as he picked up the remains of a water bug from the floor with a napkin.

  "Oboy That was on the table?" said Ruth in disgust.

  "Right on the edge here. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Just the same, why don't we go back to apple strudel?"

  "Why is it," Nathan asked with uncharacteristic irritation, "that Moellen is the one man you never suspect of anti-Semitism?"

  "Moellen," said Harry, curling his lower lip reflectively. "I know Moellen."

  Nusan laughed quietly as he stood up, still wearing his hat and his maroon wool scarf and his dark wool suit jacket. Bundled against the cold, he said good-bye and stepped into the midsummer heat.

  Sonia hurried to her manuscript.

  (Emma walks into the room and finds a tall, thin woman with long fingers and curly hair.)

  EMMA: Who are you?

  MARGARITA: I am Margarita Maza Juárez. (She waits for a moment hut gets no response from Emma.) Wife of Don Benito Juarez, the exiled president of Mexico.

  EMMA: Boyoboy

  MARGARTA: This is absolutely true.

  EMMA: The exiled pres ... Exiled my tokh ... You know, you can get pretty far with a lie. (She raises an index finger and swings her hips for emphasis) But there is no getting back.

  MARGARTA: But it is not a lie. I am Benito Juarez's wife.

  EMMA: I don't care if you are an exiled fardarter, as long as you pay your share.

  Yes! thought Sonia. And now a relationship begins.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Narrow Escapes

  WHAT AM I DOING? Nathan demanded silently but not in the least rhetorically, of Oggún, still elegantly swathed in El Vocero on his shelf, still as blank faced and silent as ever, although, Nathan thought, no more silent and no more blank faced than Dr. Kucher.

  A narrow escape, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. But Nathan always believed he was experiencing important brushes with disaster, such as the logic-defying near miss when Karoline "almost knocked on the door when the family was having Friday night dinner." The fact that Karoline, who loathed such confrontations, had never seriously considered doing this did not enter into Nathan's calculation. That could have been Karoline instead of just Birdie Nagel, and then where would he have been?

  It was a busy day at the Meshugaloo Copy Center. Felix's East Village Gourmet was having a flyer printed announcing a sale—on tomatoes. Jackie, the woman who might be a man, was printing something up about "Tomato Street Theater." It was a complicated job involving reducing a picture of a tomato and superimposing it over the skull on a picture of Hamlet. The neighborhood association had an order for flyers, and so did a group of street poets, whose program included Gilberto Banza's latest work, "Fucked in the Loisaida." Harold Kaskowitz, the classical kazoo player who for years had failed to convince Nathan to perform chamber music with him on his harmonica, was giving a concert. There were several flyers to be done for different groups in defense of squatters' rights. And Sonia, to Nathan's complete amazement, was having Emma and Margarita produced by a small but famous East Village theater group and needed twenty scripts, which seemed a lot for a two-character drama or, as Sonia labeled it, "a femin
ist out-of-body dialogue in three acts."

  Quietly, in a corner, on a small table Nathan had placed there, Sarah, whose mother was at rehearsals, was at work with crayon and paper, drawing what she said were depictions of herself having swimming lessons at the Jewish Community Center pool.

  Sonia had decided that she did not want to give massages anymore. She was hoping to be a successful playwright. With Emma and Margarita still in rehearsal, Sonia had already been profiled in four publications. The Forward was featuring her as a new Jewish writer, another wrote of her as a new Latin writer, a third as a Latina feminist, and a fourth as a Mexican-Jewish feminist.

  Money was not going to be a problem, because Nathan had decided to stop "gambling with Sarah's future." He was going to take Ira Katz's offer. He had also decided to finally confront his claustrophobia.

  Ruth demanded to know.

  Harry could not bear Ruth knowing. How did she find out? How did women find these things out? Florence certainly wouldn't have said anything. It must have been someone who saw them walking together. How much did Ruth know?

  "It's a passive-aggressive thing, isn't it."

  "A passie a ... ?" Was she going to a psychiatrist? Did she find out that way? Scientifically?

  "Maybe it's not even conscious. You resent my not cooking and so you go outside searching for the most unacceptable food."

  He hadn't thought of prostitutes as a meal substitute. This was a diet that would sell.

  "You are a grown man. You can do what you want," said Ruth. "But it makes me look ridiculous. It makes us look ridiculous. All the Puerto Ricans probably laugh at us."

  "I don't think all the Puerto Ricans know. She wasn't even Spanish."

  "Who?"

  "Who?" replied Harry.

  Ruth continued impatiently "You think you can sit in that what do they call it, cookiefrito, eating all that pork without every Puerto Rican in the neighborhood laughing about the Jew and the lechón. Oboy I know we are not kosher, but—"

  Suddenly a piercing scream stabbed the stale air of the room. And then another one. "Noooo!!"

  Harry and Ruth ran to open their door and heard the screams echoing through the hallway. As they rushed down the stairs to see what had caused the uproar, Birdie Nagel was coming up, her glasses askew and eyes wide with fury. "I was coming up to pay the rent," she declared with great and breathless indignation. "But this is the end. I am leaving! I don't care if I have to go to Boca Raton!"