The Head of the House

by Al Zuckerman

  Izzie noticed the Irisher today was sweaterless, and that his wrinkled, stained shirt smelled of an unclean body. The greenhorn, without making a show of it, raised his fingers to block out the odor from his nostrils.

  The big boy, bristling now, spat from his lofty height, the gob of spittle just missing Izzie’s shoe, and then snarled, “Got any dough, Jew boy?”

  “Pay up, pisshead,” the wiry runt chimed in, “or dis time yuh gonna get a bust on de bugle.”

  Izzie, understanding everything without understanding a word, presented a blank exterior. But his guts were stretched taut and his inner ears throbbed. He was, he knew, going to be hurt. But the goyim too would be hurt. And that, he kept telling himself, was more important.

  Onlookers had begun to gather.

  The tall youth poked Izzie rather mildly on the shoulder. He was expecting a traditional response in kind, which would then lead to heartier blows. He was unprepared for the two-bit Sheeny’s diving like a wildcat for his feet. It happened with incredible, blurlike speed—the Green Devil was suddenly lifted by his ankles, forced jerkily off the ground, and an instant later crashed down on his arm, the side of his face against the brutal concrete. A tiny red rivulet meandered from his scraped cheek to a crack in the cement.

  The other two leapt at Izzie, fists whirling, pummeling him on the top of his head, his ribs, jaw, ears, buttocks, belly.

  One of the spectators intoned, “No fair, no fair, two against one,” but the knuckle-swinging combatants seemed not to hear.

  The scrawny Jew—fighting back with demonic ferocity, springing at them from strange crouches, scampering away and then reversing and charging at their feet, kicking, kneeing, elbowing, rabbit-punching, spinning out of their grasp and then darting at one or the other and landing savage blows with his fists, his butting head—was holding his own, until the big boy rose.

  Izzie, having just at that moment floored the runty Irisher, turned and just barely glimpsed the rage-driven fist that came at his temple. His sight splintered into countless fragments of light, swirling, exploding in all directions, condensing into a meteoric blazing ball and shooting off and away into black space.

  Not one of the sniggering, oohing, clucking bystanders gaping at the collapsed, bruised Izzie would have guessed that such a defeat was, more or less, how he had expected the encounter to end.

  He had considered bringing a weapon—a knife, a small saw blade, a short length of pipe, a gun even—though he had no idea how or where he might obtain one. But he had rejected these, as he had his brother’s offer to “come over with some bulyaks an teach dem Mick momzers a lesson.” Any of that would just lead to lasting warfare. Hurting them seriously, with or without Morris’s bulyaks, would not be the way. What he wanted was not to be bothered any more, that they should respect him. For that, it would be enough that they know he could, if pushed, be dangerous—an annoyance worth avoiding. And so he had fought barehanded.

  Later that afternoon, as the children drifted and cavorted out of school into the sunlight, a boy with a flashing white smile and bright blue eyes began to follow Izzie. After two blocks, far enough from P.S. 165 so that the dusters of kids had thinned and dispersed, he ran up to Izzie and introduced himself in Yiddish. His name was Julie Dubrowsky. A lot of kids, he half-proudly confessed, called him Nutsy—but only behind his back, or he’d cut their ears off and make them eat them. Why they called him that was because he wasn’t no momma’s boy run-hide. So sometimes he too got the kishkes knocked out of him. But he too refused to take shit from any goy bastards. So it might be good if him and Izzie stuck together.

  The next day during morning recess, Izzie found his new friend waiting for him at the door as he came out into the schoolyard. Nutsy stuck within inches of him, as unexpectedly did several other uninvited Jewish boys. Before long, the Irish trio, patched with adhesive, the runt with his thumb in a splint, cautiously approached. Their sandy-haired chief, keeping a respectful distance, called, “Hey, greenie, you still sore?” Julie acted as interpreter. The upshot of the meeting was that the Green Devils invited Izzie to hang around after school and play ringalevio with them, and then maybe join them for a Micky roast. He thanked them, but he couldn’t accept. He had to work. A few days later, though, at lunchtime, the dark-haired middling Irisher, the one who’d been the least malicious of the three, offered Izzie half his apple and then insisted that the stiff-necked Jew boy take it. That was the start of Izzie’s friendship with Dan Keohane. During the five remaining weeks Iz spent at elementary school, he did not again have to harden his fingers into a fist, nor did any of the little band of venturesome Jewish lads who took to following him.

  * * *

  Izzie was almost twenty in the fall of 1923, though only five feet four inches tall, still younger-looking than his true age, and with much the same pointed features, thick wavy hair and quick eyes he had had as a boy. He had first tasted the heady, steam-heated world of Bronx immigrant opulence four years before at a Bar Mitzvah reception at the home of his dead mother’s brother, Uncle Zalman, who in an unbelievable fifteen years had amassed a furniture store, an apartment building, an apartment of his own outfitted with chandeliers and a tiled bathroom, and a truck. But Izzie couldn’t enjoy the mouth-watering array of delicacies at the Bar Mitzvah party because he hated his host.

  Izzie’s hatred of The Uncle stemmed from the boy’s disillusionment with the realities of this promised land upon his arrival in the spring of 1919. During the endlessly dragging month before he and his sisters departed Brest-Litovsk forever, Sroolik, while prodding a lagging cow in the herd he guarded, or peeling a raw potato, had dreamt of his father as a giant who drove a truck as huge and as mighty as a railroad train, and possibly too a lightning-fast, steam-belching locomotive. At night, if Sroolik still dreamt of Cossacks charging after him with bayonets, he knew even in the dream that a word from his awe-inspiring father would disintegrate the hideous phantoms.

  But the gray-haired man who met Sroolik and his sisters at Ellis Island was no giant but a measly pygmy. Deep lines furrowed into Khayim’s brow and about his tired eyes. He seemed a stranger, as did Sroolik’s squarishly built, florid-faced brother in his knee pants, flat-visored cap and short hair. And as that awful day wore on, the pygmy father shriveled further. The palatial manor house Sroolik had expected turned out to be a dark, pea-sized, three-room apartment, all but one of whose windows faced a grimy air shaft, whose hallway reeked of onions, rancid cooking grease and urine, and which in its entirety was barely more spacious than the one-room stall in Antipolye. Khayim Khargetnish, far from being master of a titanic truck, was a mere laborer-helper, slaving ten and twelve hours a day for The Uncle, lugging weighty iceboxes up and down endless flights of stairs, bearing loads that would have overstrained a much bigger man, and all for ten dollars a week.

  For a long time Sroolik had despised his father, as he’d despised the heartless teachers who made him rise, stammer hopelessly, and cause whole classes to snicker at him; the strange-sounding new name, Isadore Hargett, which a starched, dried-up woman in the school office had peremptorily affixed to him. But Izzie couldn’t go on hating the man who, even when exhausted, would poke beneath the beds and check Izzie’s and his sisters’ shoes for holes, and inquire if their sweaters were warm enough. Every morning Khayim made sure there was a loaf in the bread box, and on Friday nights, even if he didn’t arrive at home from a late delivery until eleven, he always had a fresh challeh tucked under his arm.

  So Uncle Zalman became the scapegoat, the evil one. All Izzie’s miseries were laid to him. He whose wealth seemed boundless as the blue sky was a vile, loathsome miser. If he were a man and not a weasel, he would lend his own dead sister’s husband enough for a store of his own, at the very least make him a partner. There came a snapping cold morning when his father couldn’t get out of bed, his back had been so badly wrenched wrestling with an upright piano. Bursting, the boy had charged to The Uncle’s store. Zalman had laughed. Khayim, back
on his feet a day later, beat his second son with a strap. Izzie cried out at the pain, but in his heart he grieved even more at his father’s slavishness.

  True, when The Uncle offered Iz his first job, running errands, dusting headboards and dining ensembles, sweeping, a nickel for every hour worked, the youth accepted instantly. What pure, unbridled, soaring joy he felt to jingle and fondle hard silver in his pocket, money all his own, real American money that he had earned! He became the most sharp-eyed and fleet-footed floor boy Silverberg’s Elegant New & Used Home Furnishings had ever seen. But after a few weeks his enthusiasm waned. He began imagining himself growing gray, bent, frightened like his father.

  While struggling to remain awake and intermittently dozing through night high school, he worked at better-paying jobs: a Western Union messenger, an iceman’s helper, a waste cotton rag sterilizer. And he began maturing enough to understand that ordinary labor was a cheap commodity, and that it was not The Uncle’s fault that his father, Morris and himself were still dollar-a-day nobodies. And Morris and his father probably would continue to be. Iz knew that he would not. His face a mask of pleasant acceptance, he would listen to teachers, foremen, bosses, and know that they were fools, most of them, and that when the right time came, he would shoot past and above them all. Despite his half-asleep bumbling answers in school, his shame at the shoddy hand-me-down clothes he and his sisters had to wear, his embarrassment at his insatiable appetite, his never-ending greediness for every scrap of food on the table, there remained the blood-tingling belief that for him destiny intended something special.

  It was not until the spring of 1922, three years later, that Izzie felt forced to resort to and demonstrate his talent for violence.

  As a Western Union messenger servicing the handbag industry area just north and east of Herald Square, his income reached an all-time peak. The company paid its couriers on a piecework basis, five cents for the first telegram delivered within a four block radius of the office, and for each additional delivery that same trip inside the zone, one and two-thirds cents, with a slightly higher scale for zones further away. In the same hour different runners could make twelve, nineteen or thirty cents, depending on their energy and agility. Izzie’s main obstacle to some real folding money, he soon realized, was the addressee’s signature. Often it would take five and sometimes fifteen whole agonizing minutes from the time he appeared at a bookkeeper’s cutout window until the boss-addressee was brought forth from a conference with a buyer or located amid the jungle of sewing machines. How could he speed up the process? The solution turned out to be so simple he could have kicked himself for not grasping it the first day. On the ground floor of every loft building there were elevator operators, men who lived for tips and handouts. They, he discovered, were pleased to carry his cables up to their final destinations, especially since Western Unions usually meant good news—orders or reorders. As for the signatures Izzie needed, who could tell his scrupulously varied penmanship from the real thing? Within a month Izzie was delivering more telegrams than any messenger in New York City, and his earnings had risen from six to a whizzing seventeen dollars a week.

  Almost as lucrative but more dangerous, he discovered, was his Saturday and Sunday occupation, running a floating crap game in partnership with Julie “Nutsy” Dubrowsky. Most kitchen tables on the Lower East Side hosted a poker game from time to time, although not Khayim Khargetnish’s; and every back alleyway was a potential dice parlor; so that as quickly as Izzie learned English, he learned these games. He became an infrequent and cautious player, and a modestly successful one. But creating and operating such an enterprise had not occurred to him until Julie, newly released from the State Reformatory in Middletown, reappeared one windy April late afternoon at Bella’s—the dimly lit little candy store whose stained marble-topped counter served eighteen hours a day as the Eighth Street and Avenue B neighborhood social center—and began conjuring up visions of their lolling in Florida among the palm trees.

  Izzie wisely had declined to participate in Julie’s last proposition, the venture which had led to his first rap. That one involved Julie recruiting four or five fast, dependable kids around nine years old and taking them uptown to the Times Square theatre district in the evening. He’d choose a busy street corner, one where a dozen or more people were waiting to cross. Studying the prospects, Julie would pick out a man alone who had his hands in his pants pocket. As the traffic light changed, Julie would charge up and grab the surprised man’s sleeves and yank his hands out of his pockets. Five straight times Izzie had watched the mark’s fingers go limp, and money rain down. The kids would dive for the loot, scatter in different directions, and disappear into the crowds before the startled victim could do a thing. And each of the patsies had seemed too ashamed at having been made a fool of by such little kids, to yell or give chase.

  Izzie had admired Nutsy’s generalship, the smoothness and speed of the operation, but at the same time he’d felt slightly disgusted. Not that Izzie himself hadn’t participated in countless petty thefts—but only when he’d been hungry, and not brazenly to a man’s face. So he’d stayed away. Julie, though, sporting spiffy new clothes, had become the dandy of the neighborhood, until he’d made the mistake of grabbing a set of sleeves belonging to a prizefighter who had flattened him cold and dispatched him for an eight month sojourn upstate.

  To Izzie, a crap game was something else again. Admittedly there was a law prohibiting this particular diversion, but that bore no more relation to morality or justice than the official Czarist quota in Brest-Litovsk whereby only two Jews annually could be enrolled in the Government school—and those two came always from families which could afford the juiciest bribes. Guys would shoot crap whether the two of them ran a game or someone else did. So why not them?

  A factor which might have given him pause, had he known about it before he got busy lining up cellars, barber shop back rooms and pickle-factory loading bays as locations for the game, was the existence of the Unione Siciliana. The knowledge that loan sharks, numbers operators, prostitutes, bookmakers, loft lifters, dope peddlers, and in fact all illegal businesses down to and including so lowly an enterprise as a ten-cent-limit crap game were expected to cough up regularly and plentifully to the emissaries of the Mafia capo came to Izzie as a surprise. The three grim-faced goons appeared only after he and Julie had built their game up to a point where between them they were clearing a sweet twenty to thirty dollars a weekend.

  Dusty baby carriages, sleds with rusted runners, battered wooden steamer trunks, all in helter-skelter piles and clusters filled the chilly, unheated cement-walled tenement storeroom, except for one cleared corner where a blue blanket had been adhesive-taped to the floor and wall. Jammed around it, kneeling, crouching, eyes riveted to the black-dotted, rolling, spinning ivories were fifteen or so youths in their teens and a few young men in their twenties.

  Tubby Ernie Blomberg, whose point was a ten, was crooning-praying, “Tensy, tensy, come againsy. Vai, vai, rakhmonos, tensy,” while Izzie, next to him, was making sure the piles of pennies that had been wagered at two to one matched one another. All at once, Ernie’s rhythmically shaking wrist slackened, the dice ceased rattling, his voice trailed off. Izzie, his lips still silently forming numbers, looked up, turned and saw three Wop-looking young men, all wearing neatly blocked gray hats, double-breasted coats with black velvet collars, striped silk ties, standing quietly near the door, their hands in their pockets. Their sallow-skinned, coarse-featured, coldly expressionless faces in no way fit with their elegant clothes. Izzie’s heart thumped at his ribs.

  Brash Julie, as could be expected, spoke first. “You guys lookin for some action?”

  The shortest of the three, the one with a pencil-line mustache below his vulpine nose, allowed himself a glimmer of a smile. “No. We got a little business to talk. You the sport here?”

  “Yeah, me and my partner,” and Julie nodded with his chin to Izzie, who had come to his side. “What kind a business
?”

  The Mafia collector, with a sort of menacing charm, expansively introduced himself and his colleagues. Carmen was his name, Carmen Scapellatti, and he represented Mr. Salvatore Pirone, who took care of the East Side, all the way, even up past Fourteenth Street. One way Mr. Pirone took care of the East Side was to see to it that games such as this one had every opportunity to grow and prosper in an atmosphere of security and protection, which he provided and guaranteed for a mere twenty-five dollars a week, the first payment to be made right now.

  “Listen, you Ginny bastards,” sixteen-year-old Julie was screaming at men three to ten years older than himself and a hundred years harder, “I ain’t afraid of you!”

  “Shut up, Julie,” Izzie growled through clenched teeth. “Let me handle this.”

  “There’s nothing to handle,” the infuriated youth yelled back, and turned again to the strongarms. “I’ll take you grease balls on one at a time or all three together. But you ain’t gettin a nickel outta me, not a fuckin penny!”

  That the threat of the gunlike bulges in their coats was not limited to a threat never occurred to Julie. Izzie instinctively had known better. But before he could say or do anything else, it was too late.

  Scapellatti nodded to the beefy, pockmarked goon furthest to the rear, who quickly closed the storeroom door, while Carmen in one deft motion whipped out a pistol, pointed it at Julie’s foot and pulled the trigger.

  Izzie quickly paid the money. All that mattered for now was how to rush the cursing, bleeding, moaning Nutsy to a doctor.

  That night, his pal’s foot having been treated and found miraculously to have all its tarsal and toe bones still intact, Izzie pondered what to do next. He yearned for a kindred spirit, someone he could talk with, who could show him how to blot out this nightmare. But who? His father? Good dray horse Khayim, either working or intoxicated with his twice-daily sorrowful prayers, could just as well have been living on another planet. And Morris too. Iz ran through the names of everyone at the game, his acquaintances at night high school, Western Union, his cousins. None were right, none had a mind as sharp as his. Except maybe his cousin, The Uncle’s son, Reuben Silverberg. Reuben’s orderly brain did pierce to the core of things.