The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

by Hesh Kestin

  “My father.”

  “Oh yeah. Shushan had a writ, and Mike he had a rep. First he was a tough cop—you had to be tough to be a Jew in the NYPD. Then he was a cop they threw off the force, excuse me for saying it that way, which means even the cops were scared of him, plus it was known he was alone in the world with a kid. I mean, it was common knowledge he was a desperate man. Instead of being scared something might happen to him if he got into a brawl—fists or firearms, with these guys it’s always to the death—he was more scared he might lose his work if he didn’t prove himself than lose his life if he backed off. Maybe Mike was no three-hundred pound gorilla, but he was all muscle and all guts. Shushan liked to say he was a World-War-II Marine, when the Marines were really Marines. You knew he was a Marine, right?”

  “He always kept his dress uniform. I still have it.”

  “So to protect the little he had he would rumble with the worst, which didn’t happen too often because when they saw him coming they would stand clear. Personally, though, I can tell you from experience, he was a sweet man. Very friendly. Warm like. What’d I say?”

  I straightened the line of my lips lest Justo think I might lose it. “He was different with me.”

  “Well, that happens. My father, he never told me once he was proud I went to college. Those old-time Puerto Ricans, for them if you didn’t do manual labor you were goofing off. He still can’t figure out what an accountant does. Never had a checkbook in his life. Got paid in cash, paid in cash. In a couple years he goes on Social Security—I’m afraid he’ll toss out the checks.”

  “My father and I didn’t talk,” I said. “He never told me much.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t so proud.”

  “I don’t know one way or the other,” I said. “And I don’t care.”

  “You don’t sound like you don’t,” Justo said. “If you don’t mind my saying.”

  “Next topic,” I said.

  “You’re the boss.”

  “Until Shushan shows up.”

  “Boss,” Justo said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. That’s one thing I learned from my old man.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Hope for the best. Assume the worst.”

  “That’s why people feared him.”

  “Fear is important, I take it.”

  “Oh yeah. I mean, Shushan never had to raise a hand to anyone in five years, maybe longer. Fear, it’s catching. Everybody hears the stories, some of the stories even get a bit exaggerated in the retelling. People do that. So Shushan, he didn’t have to work much, if you know what I mean.”

  “I need to see Royce and the brothers, and Jimmy and Tommy, the Chinese guys.”

  “You got it.”

  “Is there someone else I haven’t met?”

  “You putting something together?”

  “Do I have a choice?” I asked.

  “Not much of one.”

  30.

  Jimmy and Tommy Wing came in first, along with two Chinese bruisers in black leather jackets who sat by the door opposite Ira like a human wall, not introduced, not even looking in my direction. I had the feeling they were not exactly English-majors. Jimmy and Tommy, however, were as American as apple dim sum, comfortably integrated into both societies, so that Tommy immediately reached out to me in the language of sports, as they had with Shushan in the restaurant, except that I knew little of professional baseball, college basketball or horse-racing, and cared less. Forgive them: they know not Wystan Hugh Auden. At four in the afternoon they put down two double shots of Old Grand-Dad like gunfighters in a movie saloon.

  “You’re a Jewish guy, right?” Jimmy said. He wore the kind of suit that heralded the beginning of a fashion revolution, the British assault vaulting over from Carnaby Street in London and the American front opening out of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. This wasn’t exactly flower power, but close: Jimmy was decked out in a gray suit illuminated in thin stripes of mauve and pink, framed by a high collar over four buttons, a fat mauve tie, and on his small feet peculiarly pointed dark grey jodhpurs. Tommy was just as advanced in shades of garden green. Both wore sunglasses, though the suite’s curtains were drawn. “I’m right about that, like Mr. Shushan?”

  “We’re both Jews,” I said.

  “Can you explain that?”

  “The coincidence?”

  “No,” Jimmy said, moving his head slightly to the left so that behind the dark lenses set in pentagonal wire frames he was probably flashing a look to Tommy. “Jews.”

  Tommy nodded. He was not a talker.

  “We were discussing about it coming over,” Jimmy said. “Jews. I mean, they tried to wipe you out and here you are and just as powerful. It’s true you have a council?”

  “A council?”

  “That rules the world, secretly?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s in Brooklyn. Meets every four years in the back of a kosher deli on Flatbush Avenue.”

  The two Chinese were not laughing.

  “That’s it, only four years?” Jimmy said. “Is that enough?”

  “For most things.” I said. “Like the color of cars. Ever notice that GM, Ford, Chrysler, they all bring out the same colors? But mostly it’s political, like deciding who’s going to be president. We backed Jack Kennedy, of course, because he’s a Jew.”

  “He’s a Jew?”

  “Jimmy, he pretends to be Irish Catholic,” I said. “But the last lord mayor of Dublin, Bobby Briscoe, he’s a Jew. So being Irish and a Jew, that happens. St. Patrick also.”

  “How about that,” Jimmy said.

  “Mao too.” I couldn’t help it.

  Justo shot me a look.

  “Mao?”

  “You thought only Chiang Kai-shek, right?” God help me, I couldn’t stop. “Common error.”

  “Chiang?” Jimmy said.

  “You know who else? Sandy Koufax.”

  “Yeah, Koufax,” Jimmy added. “Very Jewish. Fanned the first five Yankees in the first game of the series. Broke the record with fifteen strike-outs. Rubbed the Yankees into the dirt.”

  “You don’t like the Yanks?”

  “The Yankees are basically Italian,” Jimmy said. “Joe DiMaggio. Mickey Mantle.” In total agreement, Tommy nodded with alarming vigor. “Yogi Berra,” Jimmy continued. “Joe Pepitone. It’s the dago club.”

  I considered this for a moment while the two lit cigarettes that immediately stank up the room. Gauloises. Who knew Chinese hoodlums dressed English and smoked French? Still, it was a convenient opening. “You don’t like... Italians?”

  In tandem the sunglasses came off, leaving both Jimmy and Tommy less formidable but at the same time more excitedly bright-eyed, at least visibly. Though I knew from Shushan that they stuck to their own turf, terrorizing Chinatown and a few other pockets of Chinese population in New York, I thought maybe it would be a good idea for them not to become too excited. They had a reputation for random violence. As opposed to the violence of normal hoodlums, who will gladly beat the shit out of someone on a commercial basis, Chinese gangsters might burn a fellow Chinese alive with kerosene simply because he showed too little respect. Of course they had enough business among their own. The Chinese were incorrigible gamblers, with a special affinity for blackjack, and because most had left their families behind were regular clients of the closely controlled whorehouses along Division Street. Culturally they had a predilection for hard drugs, and most of the new-style containers arriving in the Port of New York packed tight with sixty or seventy Chinese always carried enough heroin to make the shipment profitable even if the human cargo died along the way. According to Justo, if junk smelled like rotten meat, it was Chinese. “What’s to like in the dagos?” Jimmy said. “They think Little Italy it’s a state, like the Vatican or something, or Rhode Island, and God help anyone who steps inside. It’s like you have to get a visa. These days, with Chinatown so crowded, when one of us buys an apartment house on the wrong
street it’s just not comfortable, let me put it that way. The old Italians, the plain working stiffs, they’re moving out. Long Island, New Jersey, Staten Island. What are we going to do, not buy? You been on the Staten Island Ferry recently?”

  “No.”

  “It’s like Sicily,” Jimmy said, then seemed to tire of the subject, perhaps in frustration. “They don’t like us. We don’t like them.”

  I smiled. “How’d you boys like to help the Jews out with the Italians?”

  “The Jews got an Italian problem?”

  “A little one,” I said.

  31.

  After the Chinese left Royce and the brothers came in. Once I had the key it was easy.

  “What can we do for you, Mr. Russell?”

  “Not a thing,” I said. “Except maybe tell me where you get your threads.”

  “You like this style?”

  “The Negro is the best dressed man in America,” I said. “You look at the television news, you see white people who couldn’t dress their way out of a Klan costume. I’m not kidding you, gentlemen, clothes make the man, and your typical ofay looks like he’s been dressed by somebody who normally makes flour sacks.”

  “Amen to that,” Fred said. He was the tallest of the three brothers, and possibly the youngest. Ed and Ted nodded. All of them glowed metallically, the rich dark material of their suits shot through with gold thread that matched the wide bands on their porkpie hats—in 1963, unless a woman was present, men kept their hats on; when a woman entered an elevator all the hats came off, and when she got off they went right back on. Their shoes were of unusual color, brightly sueded tans and greens and blues. Each of the three brothers wore a white-on-white buttondown shirt, just coming into style. Royce’s was light blue with a tab collar that pressed the knot of his silver necktie up and out like a push-up bra.

  “You might appreciate fine dressage,” Royce said. “But you telling us for a reason.”

  “You can’t fool a wise man,” I said.

  The three brothers nodded in appreciation.

  “You still be doing it,” Royce said. “You trying to flatter us to be on your side?”

  “My side?”

  “Your thing with the Tintis, man, it a known conception. People be talking about it. They be saying, ‘Going to be blood on the street worse than Birmingham, worse than Little Rock.’”

  I looked at my watch. I got up and went to the 21-inch television in the corner, a top-of-the-line Zenith, the first with color and stereophonic sound, and clicked it on. Zenith had remote control for black-and-white sets, but not yet for color. There, booming out in a gravelly reassuring baritone, was Walter Cronkite.

  “—while the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King told CBS News he has just begun to fight.”

  And here was the man himself, dressed for societal combat in a snap-brim hat, a dark suit and a narrow two-tone silver tie that might have come out of Royce’s closet. Two months before he had thrilled part of the nation and pissed off the rest with his “I have a dream” speech during a march on Washington that had brought some two-hundred thousand civil rights activists to the capital. “That is right, because the cause of the American Negro is just and it is not going to be abandoned. The colored people of Birmingham are locked in a struggle with the forces of intolerance, injustice and plain hatred. But we will not be moved. We shall prevail.”

  Cronkite’s voice returned over footage of Birmingham firemen hosing down marchers, black and white, their arms locked together, as police on horseback swung in with batons from both sides. “An epic battle is being played out on the streets of one of America’s great cities,” Cronkite intoned. “Now this.”

  While a patent remedy called Serutan—“That’s Nature’s backwards!”—was being touted “for the quick relief of the minor aches and pains that come with our high pressure modern life,” the brothers lit joints the size of Phillies panatellas and passed them around. I wonder if Shushan had used to smoke with them: there was so much I did not know. Had my old man smoked with them as well? The idea of my father smoking boo brought a stupid grin to my face as I took a long drag, then passed it to Justo who proceeded to suck a half inch off the joint all by himself. When Cronkite came back he was talking about a presidential trip to Texas. I got up and switched it off. “I sure do want you on my side, gentlemen.”

  “Gonna cost,” Royce said.

  I looked to Justo. He shrugged. “How can you say that if you don’t know what I need?”

  The three brothers grooved on that, nodding their big heads like the bobbing plastic dogs that had begun to appear in the rear windows of American cars. You never saw them in Volkswagens, the only foreign car on the roads. Nor would you ever see a big pair of fuzzy dice hanging in front. Either would block the Beetle’s tiny windows.

  “My man, I needs your agreeance first,” Royce said.

  There was no need to look to Justo. This was a matter of someone else’s pride. “Royce, whatever you ask, you got it.”

  “Mr. Russ, you the right successor of Mr. Shushan,” he said. “That just the way he would do.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m honored.” I was not just saying it.

  “Whatever shit you be needing, we be there. Now, you know what we be requiring from you?”

  I took the joint as he passed it. “Like I said, you name it.”

  “Here what it is,” Royce said. “When this shit, whatever shit come down, be accomplished, you and me and the brothers here we going to introduce you to a little shop on Hundred Twenty-Fifth Street, and we going to buy you a pimp suit to out-pimp all pimp suits. The obscene mama of all pimp suits. And you going to accept it as our gift.”

  “That’s what you want?”

  “Shee-it, yes.”

  “Gentlemen, we got ourselves a deal.”

  Between the boo and the beau geste, we all broke down in guffaws, and not until the four were almost out the door did we bother to discuss what I needed them for. They didn’t care. Like me, they had agreed before they knew. As he grasped my hand Royce leaned close enough so that I could smell his rum cologne and, my senses heightened by the joint, even the naptholene that had been used to clean the fine wool fabric of his suit.

  “Your daddy,” he said. “One time, I was just a kid, he done beat the fecal matter out this sonbitch, not no little mo’fucker neither. Listen up, Mr. Russ. You know why he did that?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Sonbitch called me nigger,” Royce said, the door closing with a soft click, and leaving me standing there, a bit high, a lot relieved, as though a door had not closed but opened.

  32.

  Considering that Fritzi, Justo and Terri all considered it imperative I be imprisoned in a hotel suite secured by armed ex-cops below and Ira behind a steel-reinforced door above, the drive out to Brooklyn that evening had all the tension of a day-trip up the Palisades Parkway to Bear Mountain for a bracing summertime swim in a cool lake and a barbecue of chicken and corn. My father had taken me on such a drive once, and having done so must have figured he had provided the complete filial experience and need not repeat it, though the joy of such pleasures is precisely in their repetition. Anyway, it was not daytime but early evening, not summer but late November—though it was so unseasonably warm the top would have been down on the Cadillac were it not for the light rain that had been falling intermittently since morning. Still, there was an air of recreational excitement in the big car, as though we were all going to a party. Perhaps we were.

  Sitting between Ira, who drove with his customary dead-pan intensity, as if the road might disappear at any time and he must be prepared to deal with such a void, and Justo, who chain-smoked Old Golds, flicking yet another butt out onto Flatbush Avenue when we came off the Manhattan Bridge as though he were laying a trail of breadcrumbs, I found myself listening with near-manic intensity to the inane lyrics coming over the Caddy’s radio as the ubiquitous disc jockey Allen Freed lay down a line of self-congratulatory patter between s
ongs that forty years later would be called “oldies.” Apparently he was a guest on someone else’s show this evening—having lost his own show in New York the inventor of the phrase “rock and roll” was about to be indicted for taking “payola” to plug records on air—and there was clearly an element of pathos, if not self-pity, in his rich alto as he introduced The Platters singing what was already a classic:

  Oh yes I’m the great pretender (ooh ooh)

  Pretending I’m doing well (ooh ooh)

  My need is such I pretend too much

  I’m lonely but no one can tell

  Oh yes I’m the great pretender (ooh ooh)

  Adrift in a world of my own (ooh ooh)

  I play the game but to my real shame

  You’ve left me to dream all alone

  Too real is this feeling of make believe

  Too real when I feel what my heart can’t conceal

  Ooh ooh yes I’m the great pretender (ooh ooh)

  Just laughing and gay like a clown (ooh ooh)

  I seem to be what I’m not (you see)

  I’m wearing my heart like a crown

  Pretending that you’re still around

  From the back seat Detective Kennedy was good enough to offer his services as music critic. Cohen at least had the sense to keep his trap shut. “You’re gonna have to pay us double if you keep playing jigaboo music.”

  I turned around. “What?”

  “Must be something else on the radio, kid.”

  “There is,” I said.

  “Jigs is in,” Kennedy said. “All day every day on the news, there they are, marching. What kind of world is that?”

  I turned to Justo. “What are we paying them?”

  “A C each.”

  I turned back. “You want double for having to listen to jig music, is that it? Will it make you feel better if we pay you two hundred?”