The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

by Hesh Kestin

  “Yes. I will, Mr. Cats.”

  “Delighted to hear that, father. Okay, here goes. Passio Domini nostri Jesu Christi, merita Beatae Mariae Virginis et omnium sanctorum, quidquid boni feceris vel mail sustinueris sint tibi in remissionem peccatorum, augmentum gratiae et praemium vitae aeternae. That’s it. Frankly, I hope we all have the reward of everlasting life, though the Jewish idea, and Jesus wasn’t exactly an Irishman, is this one counts more. Father, it might be a good thing if you sat in your closet for a while after you hear us leave.” The right-hand door opened. Shushan stepped out, slipping a folded sheet of paper into his inside breast pocket. “Gentlemen, I believe our work here is done. Anyone for Chinese? I could do with a little Hunan myself right about now.”

  11.

  On the way downtown the silence in the car echoed the silence going uptown, but this time there was an air of satisfaction that was so thickly palpable I could taste it. I didn’t dare speak to Shushan about what had occurred. In my mind I wasn’t precisely sure what that was. If Shushan believed intimidating Celeste’s brother—for that matter, all of them—would in some way push me further into his debt, at a certain point I would have to make it clear this was not the case. All it got me was further involved in something I could live quite well without. While the radio blasted a song that reminded me I had not so much as looked at a joint for a week, I tried to think it through.

  Puff, the magic dragon

  Lived by the sea

  And frolicked in the autumn mist

  In a land called Honah Lee.

  Little Jacky Paper

  Loved that rascal Puff,

  And brought him strings

  And sealing wax

  And other fancy stuff. Oh...

  For reasons unknown, I seem to have been adopted. That was clear. Maybe it was my fault. Had I been sending out delirious signals that I needed a father or older brother? It was true my old man had died three years before, that I had grown up motherless, and that my father’s grief at her loss never seemed to allay itself in an emotional attachment to their only child. A lot of people had it worse. Me, I ate regularly, could depend on the old man if I got in trouble, and from time to time there was even the hint of warmth, maybe not enough to heat up the room but sufficient so that I did not freeze to death. And it wasn’t me who had walked into the Bhotke Young Men’s Society, it wasn’t me who had volunteered to organize Shushan’s mother’s funeral, or his mourning. It was just something that... happened. On the other hand, the idea that dominated the sixties was that nothing happened without complicity: Fidel Castro had taken over in Cuba because the US had long supported a series of brutal dictators; America was locked in a nuclear stalemate with the Soviet Union because neither side was brave enough to come to terms; in Vietnam we were getting deeper into a fight we wouldn’t win because we were too vain to understand what had happened there to the French. The ethos of the time was this: our failure—a nation’s, a group’s, an individual’s—was rooted in our own weakness or greed or lust or love or even in our genes. We could not blame someone else: we were our own enemy.

  “What the fuck is this stupid gimme-another-joint-and-all-will-be-well shit?” Shushan said suddenly.

  A dragon lives forever

  But not so little boys.

  Painted wings and giant rings

  Make way for other toys.

  One grey night it happened,

  Jacky Paper came no more

  And Puff that mighty dragon,

  He ceased his fearless roar.

  His head was bent in sorrow,

  Green scales fell like rain,

  Puff no longer went to play

  Along the cherry lane.

  Without his life-long friend

  Puff could not be brave,

  So Puff that mighty drag—

  Ira reached forward to punch in another station.

  Our day will come

  If we just wait a while.

  No tears for us

  Think love and wear a smile.

  Our dreams have magic

  Because we’ll always stay

  In love this way

  Our day will come.

  Our day will come;

  Our day... will come.

  “You know how many great themes there are for songs, kid?”

  “Love,” I said. “Bravery. Loss.”

  “Very good. Mostly it’s all love songs now. You believe in love?”

  “I guess.”

  “You ever been in love? Ira, what do you think, you’re in love, right?”

  “Right, boss.”

  “And well you should be. So what do you say—as a lover, you see this kid believing in love?”

  “I don’t know, boss,” Ira said, turning right to head around the Washington Square Arch, where folk singers and junkies were scattered around the fountain in the mostly concrete park like medieval jongleurs, their music blowing in on the wind through the open windows of the convertible. As if to hear them better, Shushan dropped the top, which lifted itself automatically from the roof, seemed to catch the air like a parachute, momentarily buffeting the huge Caddy as it came around the west side of the square, and then settled into itself, the canvass and mechanism hidden as though they had never been.

  “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night...” someone sang from the fountain to the accompaniment of several guitars and a banjo before the verse trailed off as we moved south.

  “Heroism, yeah, and sacrifice,” Shushan said. “In a way it’s always about sacrifice. Love, that’s sacrifice. Look at Ira here. Big handsome mug like that can get all the pussy in five boroughs, and all he thinks about is taking care of his Myra. Isn’t that right, Ira?”

  “That’s about it, boss.”

  “Every great song, when it comes right down to it, it’s about sacrifice. Putting yourself in the way of something powerful, standing up to it, standing for it, standing against it. You think those coloreds getting dogs set on them in Alabama they’re not sacrificing themselves? That’s a wonderful thing. I don’t know if it’ll work. But I do know they must feel real good about themselves. Even if one of them loses an arm or a leg he’ll feel like the subject of a song. You know what I’m saying, kid?”

  “That’s a very romantic notion, Shushan,” I said, then realized I might be misunderstood. “By romantic, I don’t mean—”

  “Shame on you, college boy. I know what romantic in that sense means. Tell me, who’s the most romantic modern poet?”

  I took a shot. A great one had died just the month before. “Robert Frost?”

  “Shit no,” Shushan said. “You know Auden?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What a man. Total pansy and he has more testosterone than everybody together in this car. You know how we can win in Vietnam? Make Wystan Hugh Auden and Allen Ginsberg run the show. Auden could handle the army, Ginsberg could be commandant of Marines. I don’t give a damn about the Navy and Air Force. They’re just technical. But on the ground those two would clean it up fast.”

  “I kind of think they’re anti-war,” I said, perhaps snidely.

  “Everyone’s anti-war, or should be.”

  “Were you really a Marine?”

  Shushan snorted. “Was I a Marine? Ira, was I a Marine?”

  “You sure was, boss.”

  “I was a good Marine. Let me tell you, there was a time I thought I’d make it my life. But circumstances—”

  “Korea?”

  “Oh, yeah. The Chosin people. That’s what they called us. You ever hear about the battle of Chosin Reservoir?”

  “Was it bad?”

  “It was fucking awful,” Shushan said. “That’s when I pulled the trigger on a guy for the first time. I mean, growing up in Brownsville, there’s a kind of Brooklyn thing. You could maybe kill someone, but maximum with a knife if he pulled one and you had to. But usually it was fists. You just beat the shit out of them and that was that. Okay, maximum a baseball bat. A baseball bat, it had a
certain finesse, plus not illegal to carry. Better than a gun, actually, up close. But pulling a trigger, that’s a whole different dimension. That’s why I vote for Wystan Hugh Auden as head of the joint chiefs. Ginsberg, he’d make a great leader of the Corps. These are guys they don’t back down in the face of bad news. Although, let me tell you, Wystan is not the kind of guy who’ll let on what he thinks. Should be in the Mafia.”

  “You can tell that from reading him? How do you know what he thinks other than what’s in his—” I stopped. “Wystan?”

  “You want to meet him? Miserable son of a bitch, but like I say, he’d make a fine general. You know what it takes to be a general?”

  “A military mind?

  “Kid, shut up with the wise cracks for a minute. This is serious. A general and a poet are exactly the same in one thing. What they do they have to do with critical efficiency. Not a word or an action wasted. And the action has to be more important than the man who creates it. You know Yeats?”

  “You knew Yeats too?”

  “Of course not. Yeats died fucking I don’t know forty years ago. I know Auden because he plays poker. You didn’t know that, WH fucking Auden plays poker? Badly, let me say. The man gets into dutch from time to time.” In the constraint of the front seat, squeezed between Ira’s shoulders rolling as he turned the wheel and Shushan’s smaller yet more sinewy frame that seemed to jerk when he jabbed with his left index finger as if lecturing the windshield, I was hammered every time Shushan wished to emphasize a point. “So what’s wrong with that? Everybody gets in trouble once in a while. Look at you, kid. You too, right?” When I didn’t answer he simply went on. “So what did Yeats say? He said, I’m not quoting exactly, that a poet has to choose between the perfection of his life and the perfection of his work. That’s why Wystan would make a hell of a general. A great general, all he cares about is the poem, the battle, each one, one at a time. Kid, do you know what I’m saying?”

  I nodded. “But I don’t know why you’re saying it.”

  “I’m saying Yeats didn’t have the whole of it. He didn’t go far enough. All a man is is what he does.”

  “And this applies to...”

  “To everybody,” Shushan said. “There’s Justo.” He said it Yusto. “Pull up, Ira.” The big man stopped the car in front of a fire hydrant. Across the narrow street was a police precinct. Neither Ira nor Shushan seemed concerned. “I’m going to introduce you to someone who is going to be very important in your life.”

  I could see a wiry man, hatless, in a light suit, dark shirt, light tie, standing smoking under a streetlamp in front of a restaurant in which small red-painted animals, ducks some of them, others looking mysteriously like unfamiliar mammals, were being turned on a spit in the window. The entire scene was straight out of some cheesy Hollywood film. I hadn’t been shanghaied by a gangster—I had been shanghaied by a gangster movie. “Chinga! Justo!” He turned back to me. “So why, you’re asking yourself, is Allen Ginsberg a natural to lead the Corps?”

  “You know Allen Ginsberg too?”

  “Met him once or twice,” Shushan said. “Not my kind of guy. Too much, you know, ganj. But he’s a Marine.”

  “Allen Ginsberg is a Marine,” I said, following him out of the car. No one bothered to put up the top. The windows were down. On the windshield Shushan carefully tucked a twenty-dollar bill under the sidewalk-side wiper blade, either to take care of the cops or to show the world that no one in his right mind would dare touch it. “Okay, I give up. Why is Allen Ginsberg a Marine?”

  “Because he don’t give a shit about anything but getting the job done,” Shushan said. “Goes to the sound of the guns. That’s a real poet.”

  Shushan had me by the arm as we came up to the little guy in the gangster-movie get-up. “Justo, remember this kid did such a good job at the funeral? Russy the college boy. You got something in common, right?” He turned to me. “Justo went to City College. World’s best accountant. You know what? Justo’s been doing my books since after Korea and we haven’t been audited once.”

  He was some sort of Latin, probably Puerto Rican, with that mixed-blood look, Spanish, Indian, black, maybe even a little Chinese, that seemed to demand the suspension of judgment of others because so much otherness was part of him. “I hear you did good for the shiva too,” he said. “Chinga son-of-a-bitch wouldn’t let me come to that. No spicks allowed.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Shushan said. “For the funeral and the shiva he was taking his family on vacation to Puerto Rico. I mean, scheduled for a year. What was he supposed to tell his kids—I can’t go because my boss’s mother passed? Anyway, spicks have to go back there once a year, just to visit the hubcaps they stole in New York.”

  The street was misty from the rain, the light soft as it can be only when broken up by so many humans pulsing through the streets, the streets themselves alive with the commerce of fruit and vegetable stores open until midnight, seafood markets with the fish laid out like volunteer corpses, so pleased to greet you on their icy beds, a Chinese apothecary looking like a supermarket for clientele that was a whole other species, its dusty display window full of dried spiders, eviscerations of embalmed bats, and strange fleshy plants that seemed to be growing upside down in pots hanging from the ceiling; in a place of honor a large coiled snake, banded in black and red, moved slightly as though reacting to a dream, then settled back into mimicry of the dead. Tiny storefront restaurants were lined up like troughs on this side of the street; on the other were four-story tenements and the police station. Shushan led us to the one restaurant with the mixed menagerie turning on spits in the window where, once inside, the rotisseurs in stained white uniforms and white forage caps greeted him with a familiarity that to me was effusive, exaggerated, surreal. Shushan returned the favor by shaking hands with all three countermen, who hastily wiped their red-stained hands on their aprons—each might have been indicted on murder charges based solely on apparel. “How you doin’?” Shushan said to each. “Tzing-tao!” Each in turn shouted back “Tzing-tao!”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Shushan said. “But they say it all the time. Probably it’s fuck you. Looks like we came at rush hour.”

  There was not a seat in the house. All of Chinatown seemed to have been compressed into this one restaurant, whose twenty or so tables held nearly a hundred people so squeezed together that raising chopsticks could be considered an act of aggression. The waiters physically forced themselves between the backs of chairs. One of them got to the front, repeating the whole Tzing-tao! routine with Shushan.

  “Table for four,” the waiter said. “One minute.” He turned toward the kitchen where another waiter had already entered carrying a four-foot round table upside down on his head, followed by two more carrying a chair the same way. Our guy, obviously in charge, began barking in Chinese to the occupants of three tables in the middle of the room. They merely shook their heads. He shouted again. The waiters remained standing with the furniture over them. More shouting.

  “Hey, we can wait,” Shushan said.

  “You no wait. They finish. They finish, they go.”

  As we watched the diners rush through their meals under the furniture poised above their heads, a bottle of Johnny Walker Black appeared in the hand of the headwaiter, who poured drinks for us as we stood. In three minutes one of the tables with two diners was abandoned, that table lifted out of the way and the larger table descended into its place with much shoving of the surrounding diners. The two new chairs were inserted at the table, a red cloth was unfurled and settled on the raw plywood top. Table settings mysteriously appeared.

  “Now you eat,” the headwaiter said.

  And eat we did. Despite the red-drenched meats in the window the specialty of the place turned out to be fish, plus seafood in all its bizarre variety. Everything seemed to be bathed in red sauce studded with bits of emerald green or dark brown or pink, all shimmering under the fluorescent lights.

/>   “You know this stuff, kid? This is Hunan food. Southwest China. Think of Texas. Very spicy, but not sweet unless it’s combined with something else, like salty or sour. Your American Chinese food is Guadong, which is what people call Cantonese, because Canton is where most of the immigrants from China come from. But Hunan is not just hot like Schezuan. Take fish. The idea of the sauces in Hunan food is to reveal the taste of the fish, not conceal it. And this is good fish—you can’t get fresher unless you’re a shark.”

  “Shushan is the king of fish in New York,” Justo said. “You want fish, you go to the Kingfish. He da Kingfish.”

  “Yeah, I da Kingfish,” Shushan said. “You like this fish, kid? Any kind of fish you like, just ask me.”

  “The chingao Itals are waiting for Shushan to go away,” Justo said. “They got a good feeling about what’s going to happen to my man, but it’s not gonna happen. Nothing gonna happen. We gonna get through the chingao trial and we gonna keep what we got.”