Must have fallen down in back somewhere, that’s all.
Charged with pulling victory from what would have been fiscal disaster on my first solo flight from the nest, I took my friends to dinner.
And I don’t remember the meal, and that’s all I’ve got to say about eating in Miami.
THIRTEEN
An American Gangster in Spain
Majorca
The first respectable middle class “bum” I met was a soon to be high school principle from Brooklyn who smoked “dope,” danced the mambo like a Cuban, “had” lots of women, and walked with a minstrel smile at all times. Very dark-skinned for a Caucasian, and with thick lips and curly hair, he was the Hebraic male version of Abraham’s wife, Sarah, said to be comely and black.
Anyway, Donny had just come back from a very faraway place, where the wine, women, and danzóns were said to flow as freely as in Impressionist Paris days. I, right then, decided to go there. That summer, or as soon as I could afford it, I’d go to Spain and get over to Majorca.
It was a converted troop ship, the MV Waterman, that carried my friend Marty and me on our pilgrimage to Donny’s paradise island. Two years it took me to save up for that trip. When we first escaped our moorings with deep foghorn vibrations not matched by today’s jet whine, all of my past seemed to slip beneath my feet.
This was going somewhere!
The last person in my family to ride a ship was my father on his immigrant journey to America. Turning around on the stern, drunk with Marty and a couple of hundred other budget-minded travelers, and feeling New York’s West Side recede as in a dream, I knew I’d cut the umbilical cord for good.
Out to sea and seated for my first meal, I knew the next ten days would be bad news for food. Cheap German food served by surly waiters not older than you are does not make for an appetizing prospect.
So I took to sneaking into the first-class lounge each night and heaping the tasty little sandwiches into my raincoat. Those ham and other cold cut sandwiches beat the sauerkraut and potato soups served in our class, but also served to make me impotent just when I met my first international beauty.
She was coveted by all the boys. Tall and pale, rarely smiling, Karen was the daughter of some World Bank executive. Brought up in Swiss and English boarding schools, she was the dream of every working-class, would-be poet on that tub.
The first guy to win her attention was Andrew, a tall ugly screwball who imitated the French existentialists by throwing potato salad at ship lecturers.
After five days of this brilliant joker, we took up together. Slowly at first, she telling me she liked me because of the way I walked. Something about my feet hitting the ground in a positive, assertive way, she told me in a Paris hotel room weeks later.
It was all innocent hugging and kissing on the Waterman for us. I pretended to “respect” her too much to proceed, but in reality I couldn’t get excited in the right part of my body.
My heart would pound, my thoughts would swirl, my weight-lifted arms would nearly crush her breathless, but the right thing was not being transmitted below my waist.
Years later, I would learn this bout of “impotence” was directly related to the ham sandwiches I was filching from the first-class lounge! Not as a result of guilt for my transgressions, but due to the sodium nitrates and nitrites the ham was laced with. While these preservatives killed off would-be bacterial colonizers, they also killed a man’s ability where desire was not lacking.
In sufficient amounts, the nitrates are used to quiet libido. It is rumored that in the military they gave this stuff, in the potassium form, to the boys—called it “saltpeter.”
Now, who would have guessed that a good old ham sandwich, or other preserved meats—bologna, sausage, hot dogs—will ruin whatever good fortune may bring your way during your travels. But should you be eating some of these preserved meats three times a day, while also lacking phospholipids necessary for sperm production, a simple dietary adjustment could render years of psychoanalysis into the redundant torture that it is.*
You’ve got to be careful when traveling. To know what to eat and what to avoid must not become a full-time obsession, but you don’t want to end up in a garret with the bells of Notre Dame cathedral tolling, white high heels askew on the floor next to a hastily opened lady’s suitcase, lying there in a sweat trying to explain away your failure.
Karen was understanding. And she did come all the way from London to be with me, after all. But not knowing about the nitrate family and their vicious habits once inside the human, we began to blame ourselves for this unignitable passion.
As the days went by and my diet of good French food drove away the German ham and white bread, I returned to that state of vigor common to twenty-year-olds. The romance, once inflamed, burned on for a week or two in a magical Paris I’ve never, ever since known.
Then, the long-legged pale beauty went north, I went south, not to meet again except by chance in the mouth of a London Underground tube years later.
About to descend the steps with my wife of two weeks, Karen was ascending, arguing with a decadent-looking longhair. Our faces met. We were startled to bump into each other so unexpectedly. I looked healthier than I had during those days in Paris, fuller of myself, stronger in my step, while she was emaciated, almost pimply.
We said a few words, quickly parted, and never saw each other again.
But on that first “big trip to Europe,” I did get to Donny’s fabled Majorca.
The food was so unlike New York, the land and the people somehow so much more alive, that I stayed on, missing the next semester to sample all that the poets had promised.
Palma, 1966
Christmas Day in Shatzy’s bar. I’d been there since the summer. I was a regular among the expatriates, mainly English retirees living on pensions, playing at art.
The eggy taste of Advocaat, a creamy yellow alcoholic slammer, was fashionable in the Mediterranean port bar. One thing I liked about those English writers, they just drank, without a wink, devoid of “cute” American names for their addiction.
(In Alabama, I once learned the craziest name for a drink: “Slow Screw Against the Wall”—vodka and 7Up. These were glowingly taught to me by a group of very sweet Alabamian college girls, welcoming me to the Huntsville airport for a lecture I was giving the next day.)
So, again, another season of too much alcohol (and of the wrong kind), and tasty but suicidal food. Years would pass before I learned that diet was somehow related to my mood and performance, and which to prescribe and proscribe for myself and others.
Shatzy, wiry and friendly, took a liking to me. One rainy and windy afternoon, after I had motor-scootered in the 7 kilos from Arenal, a beach town where I had an apartment, he told me to get off the island.
“Kid,” he whispered, his eyes screwed up behind a smoke cloud, “get out of here, off this island, fast.” I was shocked. Thought the crowd liked me. “Why, what do you mean?” “Look, you’re young. All they want from you,” he said, lifting a shoulder in the general direction of the others in that smoky bivouac, “is your money and your woman.”
Stunned, I looked around that tank full of human fish. Were these angels and guppies really piranhas beneath deceptive markings?
Over there, at the end of the mahogany counter, his legs twisted over one another like a rubber man, an Ichabod Crane—a drunken grin radiating from his fixed jaw—was an English “nature” poet, little known beyo
nd that grave circle.
It could not be him. He was too drunk and too kind, all the time. Collapsed on the bench along the right wall after cursing out some old lady who dared say “Merry Christmas, Mike,” was a loud-mouthed Irish novelist whose latest had just appeared as a film. His pretty, kindly wife and their three-month babe were like a quiet painting next to him, she nursing the infant while her husband slept off his latest drunk.
Definitely not them. Too honest.
Well, the Americans in the bar, sure. Highly suspect, and therefore, no threat.
That left only Max. The ex–mob boss on the run who I thought had befriended me.
Ya! The more I thought about him the more I began to believe Shatzy.
“Listen. I know this doesn’t seem real to you but, I tell you, you’re in danger.”
My eyebrows arched and he ordered a free Advocaat for me.
Max Roachman first attracted my attention because of his heavy New York accent. As I thought about it, it was Carla who was first drawn to him! I remember her saying with that tee-hee little giggle of hers, “You remind me of my father . . .”
“Oh, that little . . .”
He had us up to his place after that first night. His Spanish maid, a quiet older lady, cooked an authentic spread.
Brought over by successive waves of colonizers—the Arabs, Berbers, and Moors—fruits are so prevalent that they accompany most courses.
We began with local wine soaked in sangria, the fruits coming from Maxie’s own trees. Standing on the stone terrace and eyes wandering up to Arenal Palace, I felt very much at home.
His lousy record player was turning The Memory Years: 1925–1950, as this stocky old tough spluttered on about his wild days.
Well, what harm would it do for me to drink his wine and eat his food? (My money and my woman!)
Chomping on my first boar, with potatoes and artichokes, I listened as the old guy reminisced.
He sees me smirking and jumps up. “Here, you don’t believe me,” and he rummages through some old photo albums, his maid looking on from the archway with a sad, knowing look.
Headline: KING OF THE HOBOS HAS PENNY RAIL PASS—TRAVELS ONLY 1ST CLASS. He is shaking hands with railroad officials.
Next: Two dark-haired sisters, one on each side of Max in a nightclub: “Took ’em both home for four days.” Next: Max smiling in an auto showroom, shaking hands with a happy salesman who just sold him a Jaguar MK V and a Jaguar XK 120.
“A good time, kid, but my wife got mad when I didn’t come back home for nine months.”
We eat the paella Valenciana. All the seafood fresh from then-clean bays.
The phono spins off speed.
Over flan and coffee, he worked himself up to his true confession. A small news article tells us about his first murders: two boys in a train yard.
Then, with a flourish, a letter from then New York mayor Bob Wagner, inquiring about Max’s recent operation.
“I got friends, kid.” The books, records, suits, coats, shoes (I sneak a peek into his closets on the way to the bathroom), all “from friends,” some items delivered by visiting U.S. warships, if we are to believe this old crook.
“What happened? I can’t go back. That’s all. Kid, it’s all over now, all over.” (The Memory Years spinning off speed.) “Too much, kid. I was too young.”
But this story came to a bad end, though not quite at that dinner party. I must have known that good old Maxie was fiddling with my girl because, days later, I decided to get past his housemaid and snoop around his flat. To find “material” for a story I decided to write about him.
Against her pleading will and nonbelieving eyes, I talked my way around her objections, saying that Max had given me permission to reread his scrapbook. I don’t remember what I found, but I did invade the man’s privacy and was nearly killed as a result.
Served me right, I suppose, but I guess Max had a shred of compassion left inside somewhere. Days after Shatzy gave me that warning to get off the island, I would see Max everywhere I went. Sitting in a restaurant or a café, or wherever I would be, there Max would be. Staring at me, or visibly pointing me out to some of the notorious Guardia Civil, who we had heard would kill for fifty dollars, the going fee.
That was it. I got the message. Shatzy was right. I left. Oh, by the way. I almost forgot to mention what kept him imprisoned in his little bar. He told me this on the day he warned me to leave and start a life for myself while I was still young.
“Me, I can’t go anywhere,” he told me, his melancholic puppy eyes wet with emotion and smoke.
“It was my big night. I was lead dancer in London’s biggest ballet. The performance was on. It was my call, I froze in the wings . . . I was finished. Here I am, forever.”
FOURTEEN
Setting a Peanut Man on Fire
Coming of Age, 1952
As a kid Schwartz was a normal, if somewhat malicious, mischievous type.
He once set a “Planters Peanut” man on fire, on Broadway.
It was a holiday break, cold but not yet freezing so probably around Thanksgiving. We had taken the long subway ride in from Jamaica and were absorbing all the action that Times Square had to offer to two twelve-year-olds in from the green-carpeted world of the suburbs.
Coming out of the tube onto Forty-second Street, there was a mini playland of machines right next to the porno shop. In those days, porn was illegal so this place was put up as an “art” shop. Selling mainly B&W glossies of bimbos down on their luck—to us each a beauty, a masturbatory beauty, good for many hours of holiday fun.
Invariably the perverts who liked young boys stalked this recreational area. They would watch us, Schwartz the tall kid and me the pip-squeak. He would have the “nerve” to leaf through the thousands of glossies and girlie mags while I just hung on his side nervously stealing glances, expecting to be tossed out any minute.
As we exited, some gangly perv in a beat-up overcoat would approach us.
“You men want to see a real collection of girlie pictures?”
“Ge-get away from us . . .” said S.
“No. Don’t be afraid. I mean it. I’ve got pictures and movies of girls, naked girls in my place if you want to see them.”
And with a push, the perv would see his prey flee.
Up in the clear light of day we’d breathe freely again, taking in the mobs of neon and food smells and cops and horses and horseshit.
So S needed a little fun after the run-in with the queer. There it was! A poor man walking down Broadway with a papier-mâché peanut body and top hat, complete with tux tails, and his little cane of peanut brittle tapping the mica-chipped sidewalk.
Taking out his Zippo lighter, my big bad friend snuck up behind the guy and trailed him, all the while scratching the flint to ignite a flame on the rear of the man’s shell.
Of course the man inside the peanut outfit yelled at the kid. And his frightened eyes touched me, forcing me to grab S’s hand to stop. But shaking me off he pursued his prey, his lighter clicking until the shell had ignited, if but slowly. And then as we ran away, we saw the poor man tear his shell off and throw it in the gutter just as it roared into flame.
So this was no little prank. The kid was a vicious punk, no doubt about it. And I, always self-thought of as a “good” boy, was little more than a co-nastyholic, somehow egging the principal on with my protestations.
Not to explain us away or anything, but, more for the record, I want to explain how he got that way. He wasn’t born mean or anything, but became that way largely due to his crazy mother.
&nbs
p; And she wasn’t to blame.
It was those Benzedrine shots she got from that doctor in Jersey who was helping her lose weight. That set her off for four to six hours, leaving the family in a nightmare by the time darkness rolled around.
I remember one winter night in particular. It stands out so clearly because his life as a boy ended.
We had both gone to his house about five o’clock after an afternoon of play.
His mother was nowhere to be seen. Calling for her all around the “sprawling” brick ranch house next to Vanderbilt’s old private motorway, we heard a low groan coming from the “living” room.
Once in the usually off-limits room, I quickly took in the white sofa and side chairs hermetically sealed in thick plastic, the curio cabinets and other middle-class trappings I associated with great wealth—and then she charged like a mad cow.
“Look what you did to my wrists,” she hollered. “Look how you scarred them, made them bleed.” And she tried to scratch his eyes out!
I stood horrified.
They struggled and we ran out. When we came back, after about thirty minutes of walking around in the freezing dark streets, she was, again, nowhere to be found.
So we just tiptoed up to his large room and talked real quietly to each other and to his younger brother, then ten but still referred to as “the baby” by his parents.
About seven o’clock his father, “Sy,” came home, exhausted from his day on the truck he owned as a franchisee. The minute he crossed the door, the Benzied-up woman ran up screaming, “Sy, Sy, look what your son did to me,” and she then broke down sobbing, all the time muttering that my friend had beat her with a chain!
Naturally, Sy charged after his eldest son. Yelling at him, “You can’t do that to your mother, I’ll show you.” He cornered him in the upstairs bedroom.
As the younger brother and I watched in total shock, father and son came to blows.
Throwing real punches, they fought to a draw, the father satisfied that he’d fulfilled his duties, the son shaking with rage.
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