The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

by Hesh Kestin

  I was scooping a succulent morsel of striped bass in some sort of scallion-heavy maroon sauce that allowed the flavor of the fish through only to strike the tongue with fire, when I realized I was being invited into the conversation. “Which is?”

  “The Fulton Fish Market, kid,” Shushan said. “Our gavone friends are looking to come in, maybe during my trial even, but for sure if I go away. We don’t even know if they’re behind the whole thing, the indictment etcetera etcetera, because one thing about the goombah mentality, they see something in the hands of a kike or a spick or a mick or a nigger even and they want it, so they figure out who to get on the case. They’re like jackals in Africa, they lead the lion to the prey and then wait until the big cat takes it down, a wildebeest or a zebra or whatever, and then they try to get the fresh kill away from the lion. It’s nature, that’s all.”

  “They want what we got,” Justo said.

  “I make it work,” Shushan said. “I make it friendly. I’m like the big cop on the beat, the big mick cop who used to walk a beat in every neighborhood in the city, but now they ride around by twosies in patrol cars because they’re too scared to step out. One thing about those mick cops when I was a kid, they walked the beat. You didn’t fuck with them. Now there’s no order in the whole city. When you get that in a place like the Fulton Fish Market, which has been supplying the city with seafood since over two hundred years, you get chaos. Somebody says, ‘Hey, nobody moves as much as a bay scallop until I get paid to let it happen,’ it causes two kinds of trouble. The first kind is bad scallops. The stuff comes in the night, it has to go out in the early morning, at the worst. Sometimes you’re looking at a turnaround of twenty minutes—comes in, goes out. One minute it’s on the boat, next it’s on a truck, then it’s at the market and bim-bam thank you sam it’s out the door in somebody’s pick-up truck off to some retail market in Queens or uptown to your fancy restaurants—”

  “Or here,” I said, understanding.

  “Or here. Funny thing, sometimes you get striper caught in the Great South Bay, out on Long Island, it goes to the market a couple hours’ drive away and then somebody with a restaurant only a couple of miles from where it was boated puts it on the menu. You can’t have something as delicate as this disturbed, because fish, in case you never noticed, really stinks when it’s not fresh. Yeah, there are things you can do to clean up the smell, but fresh is fresh. The restaurant chefs aren’t fools so they won’t touch it, the neighborhood markets, they won’t screw their regular customers because that’s how they get regular customers. But unless there’s somebody looking out for the little guy, some gavone is going to come in and say, ‘Bona sera, I want mine.’ Everywhere you look they come in for the kill on the weak and the vulnerable. It’s like a nuclear bomb. You don’t even have to use it—just having it is enough. They got the trash business for the same reason. You don’t move the trash you got major headaches, rats, stench. Parking lots? You want the cars not broken up, pay up. Construction and demolition, don’t ask. They can slow things down so much they don’t have to do anything but show up and they get paid off. You know, I don’t like that Bobby Kennedy, but he’s right about the goombahs. They’re out of control.”

  “And you’re Robin Hood, protecting the little guy.”

  “Ruben Hood, yeah,” Shushan said. “Gentlemen, listen to this kid. He’s got stainless steel balls, no? Kid, you got stainless steel balls?”

  “I don’t know, Shushan.”

  “Don’t worry, you’re going to know. You’re going to learn more about yourself than you ever thought possible. That’s why I’m introducing you to Justo here. Justo and me, Justo and I you would correct me, we go way back.”

  “We go back to Korea,” Justo said, seeming slowly to grow before my eyes. The light suit, dark shirt, light tie—actually some form of silver in the fluorescent light of the restaurant—the costume of the cartoon gangster, it all melted away: I saw the man. Justo’s thin face was pockmarked along the two ridges that formed a vee from ear to mouth. His short hair was slicked back with enough oil to grease Shushan’s Cadillac. And his dark somewhat oriental eyes were small and so close together they might have met were it not for the sliver of nose that shot directly out of the meeting of his brows. In short, no movie star. But in saying just that one word he seemed to be sitting straighter, his gaze steady, his face relaxed in appreciation. “Korea,” he said again. “This crazy fuck ever tell you about Korea?”

  “I overheard him speaking of it to someone else.”

  “Yeah,” Justo said. “Chingao, they didn’t know whether to court-martial him or give him the Navy Cross.” He smiled happily, almost prettily. He had good teeth, big and white, that seemed to have been borrowed from someone else’s face. “So you know what, they did both.”

  “Ah,” Shushan said. “That wasn’t exactly the first time I was in court.”

  “Except they wanted to put you in front of a firing squad,” Justo said. “When you was a tough kid in Brooklyn maybe you could get reform school, or even worse. But—”

  “But nothing,” Shushan said. “So what I was saying is this: The goombahs, their whole life is living off others. I’m not talking about your normal Italians, Sicilian, Napolida, Abruzz—I’m talking about the kind of people they’re cockroaches. Their own people hate them, Russy—they suck the blood out of their own.”

  “And what do you do, Shushan?”

  “Me? Like I said, I’m just like the neighborhood cop, except I don’t take bribes and make a better paycheck. Anybody fucks with the Fulton Fish Market, anybody even looks like it, I’m all over them before you can say scrod, not even flounder or yellow-tail but fucking scrod. No make it cod, that’s even shorter. Which is why New York City gets the freshest fish, why people can go to work in the market and leave in the morning and nobody shakes them down, why the trucks roll in and out like a Swiss watch, like a Rolex or Omega.”

  “So you’re some kind of benevolent despot,” I said, by now wondering if I did indeed have balls of stainless steel. “You think that’s American?”

  “Fuck that,” Shushan said. “You’re going to learn you can’t do everything the right way, because of all the people who are ready to do it the wrong way. You’re just a kid, your nose is in books, and maybe you know a lot, but what you don’t know is that in the real world somebody has to make a decision every minute. Okay, sometimes you get the wrong somebody, and sometimes he doesn’t have the luxury of being democratically elected, but somebody has to step up.”

  “You know who else got the Navy Cross, kid?” Justo said. “Barney Ross the Jewish boxer from Chicago. Semper fi all the way. And what’s his name, Sterling Hayden, the movie star? You’re sitting with royalty, kid.”

  “Because you shot a man?”

  “Yeah, well,” Shushan said as more food appeared. It was red duck from the rotisserie in front. Shushan waved gaily to the countermen, who waved back, grinning. “What happened was we were in a tight spot, and somebody had to make a fucking decision. So I did. That’s all it was.” He looked across the table and changed the subject. “Ira, you going to leave some of this food for other people?”

  Whatever else was said over the meal remains a blur. The Scotch must have gotten to me—despite Shushan’s reservations about ganj, I was a pot-smoker, not a drinker. Then, as we were finishing up, two elegantly dressed Chinese in metallic silk suits and white-on-white shirts came up and shook everyone’s hand. Tables were again shoved aside so they could sit. Unlike the older Chinese at the graveside, these spoke perfect New York English—Jimmy was the voluble one; Tommy barely said a word—and seemed to think they had found a long-lost brother. They were obviously sports fans, immediately talking intense boxing and baseball and which college teams would make it to the National Invitational Tournament at Madison Square Garden. In something of an alcohol and Hunan haze, I pretended to be interested, perking up only when I was introduced well into the conversation, as though Shushan had abruptly realized he
had left me out.

  “This is Russy, my associate,” Shushan told them. “Any time he needs a hand, I hope you’ll treat him well.”

  Neither Justo nor Ira was introduced, either because they were known to the visitors or because they did not matter. Why I mattered was a mystery, one which I had already come to regard with the acceptance of an orphan who is taken in by relatives he never knew he had.

  When we walked outside into the November night the twenty was still on the windshield, and the car was freshly washed, its deep crimson paint glowing like a Red Delicious apple beneath the street lamps. I may actually have dozed on the trip to Brooklyn, the chattering grates of the Manhattan Bridge lulling me as the big Caddy rumbled smoothly over the metal, Symphony Sid, the jazz disk jockey, on the radio, so that when we got to my apartment house on Eastern Parkway I was still drowsy as I staggered past my wrecked Plymouth Belvedere, the poor thing stripped of its wheels like a quadruple amputee.

  When I walked in the door to my apartment there was a visitor.

  12.

  In reality, I surprised Celeste more than she surprised me: As deeply asleep as she was beautifully disheveled on the mattress on the floor, when I switched on the light she leapt a foot in the air, then rubbed her eyes like a child. “Oh,” she whispered, hoarse with slumber. “You.”

  “Yeah, well, I do pay the rent,” I said. “Tell me, is your whole family going to show up every time I come home, Celeste? Because if so I’m going to stop coming home. And I want my key.” For some reason—aside from what was turning my pants into a tent—I was not unhappy to see her. It had been a week since I had as much as been close to a woman, not including Terri Cats, who had declared herself exempt, and the idea of getting into a warm bed with a hot woman was hardly objectionable. That was normal. To a man, especially a young man, sex trumps propriety. What was odd is that I didn’t blame her for what happened. Maybe it was Shushan’s sympathetic understanding of Celeste’s part in the drama that had occurred in this very room only a week before, or maybe it was indeed lust, or maybe drink, or maybe I was coming to an appreciation of human frailty that was based not on morality but on empathy: in her place I would have been pissed off at me too. “You going to be pissed off again when I don’t want to see you anymore?” I said with the formality of the tipsy as I bent to hold her in my arms on the low mattress. “I don’t want to have this thing with the three Callinan brothers again. I’m running out of ribs.”

  “There’s a fourth,” she said. “But he’s in Vietnam.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “Did you give him a rain-check? Can I expect to see him too? Hi, Russell. You don’t know me. I’m another one of Celeste’s foaming-at-the-mouth siblings. I missed the first go-round, so I hope you don’t mind if I beat the shit out of you six months late.”

  “I gave them hell, Russ,” she said, her breath sweetly pungent with sleep, the must of wet flannel, a hint of cinnamon. “I told Billy was all—a priest isn’t supposed to snitch—and then he got them riled up. It wasn’t my idea.”

  “But you laughed when you heard the news?”

  “I did not,” she said. “Maybe smiled. But I didn’t know how bad it was, not at first. Then they told me. Russ, if I can’t have you the one way I don’t want you the other.”

  It occurred to me Father Bill might turn up with his brothers yet again to weigh in with another opinion, to say nothing of their fists, but I wasn’t going to spoil the moment, or the hour if I could stay awake. “You always feel so good,” I heard myself murmur. This in itself was strange. Celeste was mostly bones. When I mounted her her hips used to gouge me like adzes, and there was precious little padding above the waist as well. She was one of those women who believed the abominable homosexual lie, then just getting started, that equates undernourishment with beauty—no man who actually has physical sex with women wants one who doesn’t have a certain softness about her, a nice round ass that raises her center up like a proffered blossom, and soft breasts to rest his head on afterward. Celeste had none of that. She was in fact an Irish-American prequivalent of Twiggy, the anorexic British model who soon would be on all the magazine covers. Celeste’s was the coming look: both sensual and androgynous, eyes staring straight at you, and always the suggestion that there was not a great deal of washing going on. This was not because there wasn’t. Celeste had the natural strong musk common to Irish redheads—it suffused a room when she was aroused, electric red hair that fell around her shoulders like a shimmering cape, and curiously thin lips she could hinge open like a python’s to swallow mine. Also she was insatiable. Maybe by the time I was Shushan’s age, which I made out to be closing on forty, I would slow down enough to be thankful for a respite now and then—so far I had never seen Shushan with a female aside from his sister and his mother’s corpse—but for the moment I was grateful for a woman who could keep up with me, who wasn’t a universal recipient, ever ready to be sung to but unwilling or too unsure to be part of a duet. But I was getting ahead of myself: within minutes, maybe seconds, I was asleep on her neck, her thick hair tickling my nose as I snuggled against her—for a bag of bones she was surprisingly flexible—and it wasn’t until early morning, five-o-five by the loud-ticking Big Ben alarm clock on the floor, that I woke to find her astride me, which is just what I’d been dreaming. The position was natural for her, because she was almost as tall as I, with long thighs that allowed her to slide up and down the length of my cock like a violinist at full bow. This she did with real precision, because like the woman Lady Chatterley’s lover complains about, who uses a man as a conveniently warm dildo, Celeste was able to bring herself off repeatedly simply by stroking and bearing down. But unlike DH Lawrence’s example, Celeste was as generous about my pleasure as she was of hers. In fact, I rather doubted she could make the distinction. With her mouth sucking my lips and her hands pinning mine—a hold more erotic than real; I doubt she weighed much more than a hundred-ten—Celeste worked herself over me like a piston and each time she reached a crescendo would bite my lips with such savagery that after an hour they would have that bee-stung look of the well and aggressively kissed. But now, for the first time, while she fucked me I seemed to have flown out of myself, risen to the cracked and yellowed ceiling, and was watching and wondering what it was she felt about me that I hardly felt at all.

  Certainly it was not the first time I was the object of love or at least specific lust. For all that I was young, handsome and virile, I knew that I would win no prizes as a lover. Maybe I was too handsome and certainly too young, and in an era where women had learned to become as aggressive about their sexuality as about their politics—the two already having become terminally confused—all I had to do, at base, was show up. I never chased women, merely accepted or rejected them when they chased me. I had early on come to see women as interchangeable parts, so that when I was tired of one another could be brought in like a relief pitcher, like an endless bullpen of pitchers warming up. One girl I knew complained that I was the most relaxed lover she had known—that it was almost as if I didn’t care. I didn’t. But now, somehow, I did. Yet this was not someone I cared for.

  Celeste was just another girl. In time she would be memorable less for who she was than for what her brothers had done to me. There was nothing about her that inspired love, a fact that may or may not have had to do with what Shushan seemed to have picked up: I did not do love. I did sex. I did like. I did desire, passion, amusement, vanity, pleasure. But love was something then so far beyond me that it might as well have been another language, another culture, another species. If I cared anything about Celeste it was because she was here now, pumping me like a lubricated well-handle, writhing and moaning as if to tell me I was the one, the only one, the great and all-powerful one—but all I heard beyond the sound of her moans, my moans and air being expelled from the bellows of her cunt as she squeezed down on me was that I was the convenient one, the present one, the current one. In seeing Celeste I saw myself.

  Yet Cele
ste had done something I would never have done: cared enough for me to try to hurt me, to get back at me, to satisfy in hate what she could not satisfy in love. Celeste was better than me: she felt. The only thing I could feel as Celeste’s sweat-drenched hair leapt about her freckled bony shoulders and her eyes focused on mine as though she knew the truth but no longer cared, was that for the first time I knew something of the truth about myself: I was the invalid here, I was the wounded, the messed up, the fucked up, the heartless, the frigid, the nearly dead. And yet here she was, clutching me to her, screwing me into her as she gasped and bit and came one final time in a paroxysm that set me off, but for me the sensation was merely release, not pleasure, a kind of constricted pain, and even as she kissed my face, licking the salt off me and murmuring, I felt sickened by myself, by my unwillingness to reach out to this woman who reached out to me. But instead I said only, “First your brothers and now you.”

  “What,” she said.

  “Trying to kill me.”

  “I was trying to love you.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Norman Mailer says it’s the same,” she said.

  She may have said more, probably did, but I was passed out under her even as she slipped off to lay beside me caressing my cheek with her freckled hands, and I didn’t wake up until I dreamt someone was trying to break down the door, and woke to discover it was no dream.

  13.

  As in many New York apartments in the nineteen-sixties, the door to this one was reinforced with an iron bar braced from a hole in the floor. The rule was simple: if you lived in a place where you had to worry about making the rent every month, you needed a steel bar for the door. You lived by definition in a high-crime area. Aside from Shushan, who could afford to leave a new Cadillac with a twenty-dollar bill tucked under the windshield-wiper blade in Chinatown, everyone I knew had a barred door, a steel grill on any windows fronting a fire escape—which made escaping a fire less than likely—and a baseball bat in the entry-hall closet. I had the bat in my hand when I went to answer the door.