A Woman of Uncertain Character: The Amorous and Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted to Be a Respectable Jewish Mom) by Her Bastard Son

by Clancy Sigal

  To my complete surprise, one day he said, “Snap it up, Boy—we’re out of here,” and jaunted out of the store with me trailing behind, Ma just standing there.

  His near-death experience having released him, and with plenty of time on his hands, Dad began taking me all over Chicago with him, couldn’t care less that we’d become truants, me from school and him from Jennie. It felt wonderful. At first we visited some of his old friends, the Tough Little Jews who operated small laundry stores like ours, where he let me hang out while he dealt pinochle in the back of the businesses that had no business. And if a wife complained, Dad would bow himself out with mock graciousness—“At your service, dear lady”—his contempt and self-contempt showing. He brought me for a visit to the vast Union Stockyards where he’d once commanded respect as a business agent for the Butchers International. The stink of newly slaughtered meat mixed with the frightened shit and piss of the slain animals disgusted and enchanted me. Dad introduced me to Alex, his former bodyguard, a colossal Ukrainian, with his massive chest bulging out from a blood-smeared leather apron. Alex’s job was to patrol the two iron rails of the main conveyor belt of cattle hanging down from their twine-tied hooves and stun them with a bloody sledgehammer before slitting their throats. During a rest break Alex invited me with gestures to share his tin jug brimming with newly killed cow’s blood, a widely used specific against tuberculosis. Dad took a nip of fresh blood and urged me to try it, which I did and gagged. Both Alex and Dad laughed. “You got a real kid there, Leo,” Alex said.

  Dad was visibly proud of me for taking a second slug of the blood just to prove I was a real kid.

  Impatient and unable to be still, Dad moved on to penny ante gambling at pickup pinochle games and betting on himself at local pool halls, especially Weinstein’s Billiard Parlor on Roosevelt Road and Independence. I believed there was nobody better than Leo Sigal—Homburg and spats and high-button high-shine shoes, a cigar cutter suspended on a thin silver chain across his ash-spattered vest—leaning at a crazy angle across the green baize Brunswick table, sighting along an August Jungbludt cue, taking his sweet time, losing almost every game against all comers, but not seeming to mind in the pure exhilaration of gambling against himself and not the capitalist system. My supreme pleasure was when he let me rack up the billiard balls. Even today the hollow click of an ivory ball caroming off the cushion into another ball, snick! is a sound that summons up the scent of blue tobacco smoke that fogged up Daddy’s pool halls. I grew up in smoke that turned me on like nitrous oxide. (And gave me lifelong bronchitis.)

  To be like, and to be liked by, Leo Sigal was all that mattered. As for school truancies, Jennie was my partner in crime; at home, in all sorts of subtle ways, she encouraged me in any misdemeanor that promised closeness between her man and her son. She lovingly reblocked one of Dad’s old Homburgs so that I could wear it exactly at his jaunty angle, and somewhere she begged or borrowed a second-hand topcoat like his with velvet lapels and “English dandy” drape, and she stuck a white handkerchief in the breast pocket, just like his. I even copied Dad’s peculiar shooting style, leaning almost parallel across an unoccupied pool table, my right leg lifted like a stork’s. An old pair of his spats found themselves on my feet. I was completely unaware of the absurd picture I made—Buster Brown shoes with spats, knee-length knickers, topcoat, and fedora, until Ike Lerman pushed me over in the snow. “You look like a fat pimp,” Ike jeered. That word again.

  My heart practically burst as I sat alongside Dad dressed like him when he took me to see Willie Hoppe, the world’s reigning three-cushion billiard king, play an exhibition in the Holy Vatican of American pool, Bensinger’s on Randolph Street, with its velvet curtains and original oil paintings on the walls, and wrought iron open cage that brought you up three floors to the cathedral-like hush of high-stakes snooker. It forever imprinted on me the idea that a poolroom, a poker table, a bookie joint was not a haven for felons but a modern agora where stylish men conducted the real business of life. Dad, a Greco-Roman wrestling buff, also brought me to watch the “monster of the midway,” football star Bronko Nagurski, wrestle Jim Londos, the “Golden Greek,” at the Chicago Stadium; and where the newly retired welterweight champ and west side hero, Barney Ross, climbed out of the ring as a featured guest and shook hands with everybody in our row, including Dad and me. Barney Ross! Dad was initiating me into a manhood ritual and I grew taller in his company.

  He was growing me up his way, and I flourished in his sight. One Sunday night he even took me to my first play, a revival at the Blackstone Theater of Sinclair Lewis’s antifascist It Can’t Happen Here, in which the actors playing American Nazis burst into the theater to seize the stage and threaten the audience. When we got home, Dad switched on my tabletop green-eyed Admiral radio until he found Father Coughlin, the anti-Semitic priest, ranting about Jewish control of the banks and press. “There will be a reckoning. A day will come when the money lenders will be whipped out of the People’s Temple and Christians will rejoice in the redemptive power of Judgement Day,” Coughlin ranted.

  Dad switched off the radio and said, “Remember that man’s voice. Now what’s the Boy Scout oath?” Not waiting for an answer but curling a fist under my nose: “You’re a Jew. Be prepared.”

  A Killing in Gary or Wherever It Was

  A writer named Rick Cohen recently wrote a book Tough Jews, about his heroes, including Killer Lepke, Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, and Kid Twist Reles, who were psychotic neighborhood thugs, professional strikebreakers, wimps with guns. The author clearly knows little of really tough Jews, the kind of people I grew up with.

  Men such as my father and his friends.

  My memory of the following incident is misty, as it tends to be when I am confronted by, or participating in, traumatic violence. For years I assumed this all happened in a dream my unconscious had constructed from the Hitler terror and fragments of old crime movies. Gradually, it kept coming back to me, always in the same meticulous detail even though I know it’s possible to hold onto a false memory that is so vivid it clings like a leech. But when I finally located my father, he mentioned it in an offhand remark without prompting and then, when he saw he had my attention, he changed the subject. (Me: “But it did happen?” Leo: “In your dreams, boy.” Me: “But you said—”) For reasons best known to himself, he, like Jennie, had gone from keeping secrets in order to survive to holding back out of habit.

  One snow-driven Saturday moment in Chicago when Dad was eking out a non-living with a collar-starching route—among his last moments with us—he offered to take me along to a picket line in Gary, Indiana. We didn’t tell Ma. It took him forever to crank up the ice-solid engine of his used Plymouth, a step down from the old Hup. I was thirteen and thrilled to be invited. He bundled me into the old car and drove out to South Chicago where he picked up some more union guys and rolled past the Indiana state line to a packinghouse worker picket around an Armour or Swift plant, I forget which. I had a grand time squashed in the backseat between guys I wanted to be like, including Dad’s old bodyguard Alex, the blood-guzzling Ukrainian. On the actual picket line nothing much happened, just the usual, hands warming over upturned oil drum fires, jokes, Hey Leo that your kid where’s his union button?

  On the way back to Chicago we—I felt so proud to be one of them—stopped at a greasy spoon diner off the highway where I ordered a chocolate malt and spun around and around on a revolving high stool at the end of the counter, in pure heaven. With an earsplitting crash, the diner’s front window collapsed, somebody picked me up by my coat collar and flung me over the counter, where my head hit a coffee urn and I blacked out. I never heard, or remember hearing, shots. Or ever got a straight story about it. Dad hustled me into the Plymouth and when we got home to the store Ma was furious. “Are you out of your mind, Leo? Completely mishuga?” Jennie never got it about Dad and me, that I would have died—preferred dying—for him. A few days later there was one of those big Chicago labor funerals for Dad’s
friend Carmichael, who apparently had been hit by the slugs in the diner. Jennie, Leo, and I marched down Ashland Avenue hand in hand among hundreds of mourners. Banners, songs, and a band from the plumbers’ union.

  I’ve gone in vain through old Chicago newspapers in an attempt to find the incident. There are lots of gangland murder stories—Schemer Drucci is the only hoodlum ever killed by the police rather than by other mobsters—but I guess labor violence was too routine to make it into print. Dad had wanted me to witness that part of his life, to understand something about it, but it only made Ma want to reclaim me again and to keep me safe and sissy. Clearly, what excited me about being with Dad only filled her with dread. For a long time afterward, whenever I got into any kind of trouble, petty or not, and pleaded “Nothing happened, Ma” she’d say, “Carmichael happened.”

  Spring was on us, and playing hooky as usual, I lounged around the melting snows in my ridiculous topcoat with muddy spats, wondering what new escapade Dad was cooking up for us. I bounced into the store, and Jennie, at her sewing machine by the front window, said without a tremor, as if talking about the weather, “We’ll have early supper. Set the table. For two.”

  The next time I saw Dad was twenty-three years later.

  7 Bum Heaven

  1937–38—Cubs lose World Series to Yankees in four straight. Shirley Temple tops box office. Hindenberg zeppelin crashes. Japan invades China. Gas masks issued to British civilians in Munich crisis.

  “… Don’t tune me out! Hang on—this is a big story, and you’re part of it … It feels as if the lights are all out everywhere—except in America. (Up chorus Star Spangled Banner) Keep those lights burning! … Hello, America! Hang onto your lights! They’re the only lights left in the world!”

  —reporter Joel McRae into a London BBC microphone as Nazi bombs drop in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent

  YOU HAD TO BE a Deaf Augie not to hear the Nazi war drums in the Berlin radio broadcasts and screaming newspaper headlines and in Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film Triumph of the Will, a Nazi coup de theatre widely shown all over Chicago. We Rockets had no doubt our turn was coming. The Devil in Europe had us in his sights. After all, were we not the Chosen People?

  The Devil came to Chicago, too. His name was Tom Girdler, chairman of Republic Steel works over by a high grass prairie on 113th street on the southeast side. On Memorial Day 1937, in a picnic atmosphere, massed ranks of Chicago police, sweating in their blue wool uniforms under a hot May sun, shot forty unarmed striking steelworkers in the back, killing ten, as they waved American flags. Women and children were beaten, clubbed and gassed, all of it caught on a Paramount newsreel. The Chicago Tribune headlined the massacre RED MOB LUSTING FOR BLOOD.

  Some of the wounded, bandaged, and dazed made their way to our Family Hand Laundry miles away from the killing field. The victims did not want to go to a normal hospital because the cops had fanned out all over Chicago picking up troublemakers, and the Sigals were known as safe harbor.

  When the first damaged strikers wandered into the store, Jennie sprang into action, making sandwiches and coffee and acting as traffic cop to the toilet in the corner; my job was to crouch on the store’s roof overlooking Kedzie Avenue and peer over the parapet and if I saw any approaching cops to kick on our ceiling as hard as I could.

  Ma and me, a team again.

  Venus Among the Hoboes

  Wherever and whenever Jennie and I moved, even into the pokiest rooming house, she used a nail file or kitchen knife to scratch on our door lintel the signs below. They were a secret code, meaning, respectively,

  “OK good people”

  “Easy handout” and

  “Kind lady.”

  Any place we lived was a stop on the Hoboes’ Highway.

  During the Depression, tramps—who might be ex-cons, battered women, wild kids of the road, fugitive jailbirds, IWW roving agitators (Wobblies), or just plain homeless vagrants—drew symbols of a new language to help fellow “bums” find their way during hard times. The signs, known as hoboglyphics, were scrawled with chalk or coal chunks on sidewalks, trees, walls, doors, trestles, and fences, a secret code that gave information and warnings to their fellow knights of the road.

  At 1404 South Kedzie, it was an established part of our routine to open up the store in the morning and find a homeless man huddled inside our doorway waiting for a handout. Whatever our circumstance, Jennie never let him go without a baloney sandwich and coffee or a Nehi orange drink, of which she kept a plentiful supply for emergencies. She was never afraid of these unkempt strangers who kept tramping in and out. Especially after the Republic Steel massacre, the word spread on the bush telegraph that the Sigals were a soft touch, and hoboes came in droves. Our back room soon filled up with unwashed unshaven hungry strangers who smelled really bad and looked worse. Without any cash customers in the front to distract her, Jennie piled up Wonder Bread-and-baloney-with-French’s mustard sandwiches; fussed over the men; let them shave and hose down in the fifteen-gallon galvanized iron washtub that was the family bath. Occasionally a guy wandered in who Jennie had known in better days, but there was none of this “Jim, what happened to you?” crap because hard luck was the common coin. Ma was very careful not to violate the guys’ dignity; there was no shame about being on the skids. Anyway, a number of our visiting hoboes wore their poverty as a badge of honor, a freemasonry of the road.

  I was an awful snob about the bums who took Jennie’s attention away from me now that I had her all to myself from absent Dad. Their stink, their dark jaws and dirty handkerchiefs, their very presence in our house, put me off. I was going through a conformist phase I blame on MGM’s Andy Hardy series of movies; from the balcony of the Central Park Theatre we jeered and threw empty Milk Duds boxes at teenage Mickey Rooney playing Andy, but secretly I envied his Ford roadster, his white picket-fenced house, and his saintly parents—the wise old Judge and the eternally tolerant Mrs. Hardy—everyone, including Andy’s pucker-lipped straight-nosed girlfriend, Polly Benedict, so goyishe clean. In Andy’s hometown of Carvel, Middle USA, there was a verifiable absence of street fighting and horse turds on the streets and old men blowing snot on the sidewalk.

  Our hoboes didn’t belong in an Andy Hardy movie. What studio in its right mind would want to dolly up to a polyglot bunch of ragged-trousered philosophers, boxcar willies, rabble-rousers, Wobbly lumberjacks, chronic radicals, self-taught Reds, Trotskyists, socialists, De Leonists, Schachtmanites, Cannonites, conscientious objectors left over from the Great War, bohemian anarchists, labor heroes and small time hoodlums, Preacher Caseys of every political stripe or no stripe at all? Where did they fit into a Busby Berkeley musical? They were outside the frame, but inside my house.

  To them, I was merely “Jennie’s kid,” to be casually ignored, looked through, and talked past, there but not there, no offense young man. That was the culture then. So I crawled under my collapsible card table to eavesdrop or do my school homework and let it all wash over me, the torrent of argument, gossip, debate in these nonstop seminars on revolutionary “theory and practice.” The Utopian stars—Kropotkin, Durruti, Bakunin, Malatesta, Henry George—ricocheted like bullets around me in fierce disagreements between the Communists and the anarchists. Much of what the bums were talking about was way above my head, but it didn’t matter; it was great having noise again in the store. It’s said that if you play Mozart to an infant in its crib it will grow up with an instinctive feel for great music. Same with me, only the music was these intense, passionate debates over what kind of world I was about to inherit.

  Jennie was happier, too. She climbed out of her drab, husbandless housecoat into her low-bosom, Boston Store “styles for the stout” dress—her Sunday-promenade frock—and her step seemed lighter, her face more animated. She smiled a lot more easily. She didn’t exactly flirt with the strangers or cock-tease them, that wasn’t her style, but male animals prowling about visibly warmed her blood.

  She presided over our consta
nt turnover the same way she ran union meetings, with a light but firm hand. Her only rules were: no bad language in front of “the boy” (me) and no weapons. Like Tombstone’s Wyatt Earp, she required all guests—the word she insisted on—to deposit their clasp knives and knuckle-dusters in the Tampa Prince Invincible five-cent cigar box Dad had left behind.

  This was her element, her world—men going about their business. It didn’t matter that they had no jobs and wore ragged clothes and had cardboard in the soles of their shoes. To Jennie these tramps, bums, and hoboes were somebodies who required attention, her attention, and, if handled tactfully, her management. She did not pretend to be Florence Nightingale or Mother Cabrini, Chicago’s own saint, nor did she fake being one of the gang. She was, in every sense of the word, a comrade.

  Since nobody paid me no never mind, I felt impelled to assert my own identity to these scrungy intruders. So one day I rolled out from under my folding card table to boldly announce, for God knows what reason, that from now on I was changing my name to “Lance” Sigal. Lance, got it? The name of the son of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, the pampered kid who newsreels showed tooling around in a fully motorized streamlined go-kart.