by Steve Stern
“There’s this kid gets a chameleon at the circus, the kind you fasten to your collar and it turns the color of your shirt. He visits his mama in the hospital where she’s getting radiation treatments and the chameleon is exposed and by morning it’s grown to the size of the Rock of Gibraltar.”
“Is it still attached to his collar?” asked Bernie.
“No, fool. It wadn’t but a dinky plastic chain. But there’s still like a bond that connects the boy to the monster. Anyway, the monster devours whole cities but the army can’t find it ‘cause it blends into whatever landscape it’s in. So—”
“Lemme guess. The army enlists the kid, who’s the only one that can see the monster, and he feeds it an A-bomb concealed in a giant meatball.”
“You saw it too.”
“So what becomes of his mama?” He knew she was fond of sentimental endings.
“Oh, her and every other cancer patient on earth is cured by the green cloud that surrounds the planet after the monster explodes.” She made to dry her eyes with her sleeve. “Your turn.”
Bernie had to think, though not for long. “There’s this kid”—there was always this kid—“who wakes up on a day that’s like an extra calendar day, a day that contains all other days.”
Lou yawned demonstratively. “Here it comes,” she said, because Bernie’s tales always involved some occult concept with no discernible plotline.
“Everything that’s ever happened is happening all at once, and the kid—he’s past puberty—meets a woman who’s Bathsheba but also Queen Esther and Bess Myerson and Penelope Cruz…”
“Another chameleon,” remarked Lou, who despite her feigned boredom had a weakness for Bernie’s peculiar line of guff.
“And she invites him into her tent or boudoir,” he continued, and here began to describe the seduction in graphic terms: “She asks him to suck her nipples like they’re jujubes, and part her thighs—”
“Like the handles on a posthole digger. You didn’t tell me this was a porno.”
It was then that Bernie believed he could see on the tattered screen all the mythical ladies melding into the single image of the girl beside him, the soft whorls of whose ear he had begun to trace with his tongue. She let him, allowing their canoodling to reach an intensity that her companion, despite some lingering frailty from the previous night’s intestinal purge, was single-mindedly advancing. He had initiated, to his way of thinking, actual foreplay leading toward an inevitable consummation. Over time Lou Ella had come to regard their groping as merely a means of launching her “friend” into astral realms; it was more like an exploratory intimacy between schoolkids than lovers. But although she was dressed provocatively as usual, a paste ruby stuck in her navel, the low-riding jeans grazing her pubic bone, she was nonetheless alarmed by Bernie’s ardor.
“Cool your jets, dude,” she cautioned him, having had enough of false hopes. “Put a lid on your id,” shoving him away to arm’s length.
But when Bernie persisted blindly she detected that some new dispensation was afoot.
“What is it you want?”
“Oo,” mumbled into her neck.
“Me or my bones?”
“Phame differumph,” he panted while gnawing her shoulder.
She cocked her head quizzically. “That’s a mouthful coming from alias Mr. Incorporeal.”
Still she asked him to hang on a minute while she transferred the car seat that Sue Lily was quickly outgrowing from the backseat to the front. Having traded places with the lackluster infant, they proceeded to tear at each other’s clothes. In the throes of a carnality that had clearly infected the girl as well, Bernie felt her fingers beginning to invade his fly, taking him in hand with a hopefulness that, for her part, she hardly dared to indulge. But while her touch did not elicit the combustion that routinely catapulted him into Elysian precincts (leaving behind a body in which passion was no more memorable than an aborted sneeze), neither did it result in their long-deferred union. Instead, her touch caused the seed to spill forlornly from his drooping organ. When he recovered from the paroxysm that had blasted his thoughts and defibrillated his racing heart, Bernie observed that the girl was holding in the palm of her hand what appeared to be glowworms lit by golden filaments.
“Next time,” advised Lou, “as a precaution against your hair trigger, when I touch it, try to think of something gross.”
1912 – 1929.
My mama was a sensible lady, my papa a dreamer,” Bernie read to Lou Ella Tuohy from the dogeared journal of Ruben (called Ruby) Karp, “and from them I inherited exactly nothing. Sometimes I even thought I wasn’t their son; I’d been dumped in the cradle in place of their real child by demons, the ones my father said the immigrants had left behind in the Old Country when they came to the New World.”
BETWEEN THE two of them my parents had a corner on most of the virtues on earth, so there was nothing left for me but to become a black sheep. My papa for all I knew was a tall man, though his crimped spine caused him to stoop as from a heavy load, but I was short like (okay) my mama; I was pint-sized but wiry and handy with my fists, with a temper that could take me to the brink of delirium and beyond. In a fight I was blind, while my body, compact and fierce, followed instincts of its own, and when my vision cleared, I would find my opponent (or opponents, since I never backed down from the odds) unconscious or fled. Growing up, I was oppressed by the prevailing tranquility of our household, so that once I was old enough to seek it out, I put myself in the way of brute behavior. I attended prizefights, dogfights, instigated back-alley brawls; wherever a shemozzle was likely to break out, there you’d find me, rubbing elbows with the disreputables that frequented such places. At first they challenged me, my lowlife cronies, then they initiated me, and afterwards I was a member in good standing of their tribe. Of course the old guard hoodlums, the Yid Mustache Petes like Monk Eastman and Dopey Benny, were all dead or gone straight by then; the climate had changed since the days when the shtarkers were content to poison horses and set fires, and labor-racketeering was in the toilet since the rise of the unions. This is not to say that old-fashioned mayhem was obsolete. The gangs still kept their hand in the traditional rackets, but the real action since the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment was in illegal whiskey. The whole ghetto had been colonized by homemade cookers and bootleg stills, speakeasies having cropped up in every cellar and barber’s closet, so there was no end of trouble available to the resourceful young man.
Naturally my family saw to it that I remained unacquainted with the city’s seamier quarters during my childhood, which must have looked from the outside to be more or less idyllic. My world then was mostly restricted to the Upper West Side, its tidy streets populated with Jews-made-good, but every least excursion whetted my appetite to stray farther afield. They dressed me in middy suits and Buster Brown caps and took me for strolls along the river or boating in the Central Park basin, where I might try to rock the dinghy till it was swamped. I was equally bored by our family outings to the Yiddish Art Theater on Second Avenue, where Muni Weisenfreund would age half a century while waiting on stage for a messiah that never came. Nor did I have much patience for the flickers we viewed from the jewel-box balconies of picture palaces; all those blood and thunder romances featuring foppish John Gilberts and Valentinos gave me a pain—though I’ll confess to a weakness for the Raoul Walsh three-reelers in which Bowery toughs battled the cops over downtown turf. I was a witness to some of the premier attractions of the day: Shipwreck Kelly swaying atop a flagpole above the Hippodrome, Harry Houdini escaping a straitjacket while dangling from his heels twenty floors above Times Square—all of which made me the more anxious to commence some exploit of my own here on earth.
On high holidays my mama and papa would take me to the Greek Revival synagogue on West End Avenue, where a rabbi in ecclesiastical robes and top hat preached pap to the choir. I would grind my teeth while Papa, to calm me, whispered that I shouldn’t be fooled by the tiresome ritual: there
were creatures, golems and kapulyushniklim, hidden away in the attic.
“I thought you said the Jews left all that stuff back in Europe,” I protested, but he explained that this was “some of the stuff that in the hold of the Hamburg-Amerika Line they stowed themselves away.”
Only once do I recall having been to the old immigrant district in my early years. That was when my father took me for a ride on the top of a bus to visit his Canal Street ice plant, where he showed me around the workings of the whole operation. He also introduced me to an otherwise vacant locker in which a cedar casket propped on trestles contained an old man in a block of ice. Both the business and the boisterous neighborhood captured my interest, but the old man made so little impression that over time I came to confuse him with a dream.
They were an odd couple, my parents: my mama with her Dresden china complexion and cascade of blue-black hair, which from vanity or indifference she refrained from bobbing in the fashion of the day; Papa with his rooster comb and camel hump, his bughouse ideas and the curdled Old Country accent he never lost. Sometimes I think I hated him for being a cripple, or rather for not realizing he was a cripple and behaving accordingly. I never understood how my mama could be so adoring of a character that should have embarrassed her by his very presence—or did she think he was a complement to her beauty? Not that Mama ever seemed to notice the way she turned heads. They doted on me, the pair of them, so much that from the first I felt I might suffocate; their brand of devotion could shrivel your petsel like a salted slug. Meanwhile their affection for each other was such an exclusive affair that it kept me confined to the circle of their intimacy. “Don’t love me so much,” I pleaded from as far back as I can remember, and when they persisted I set about proving I didn’t deserve it.
Our apartment, which had seemed so ample in my infancy, shrank as I grew, crammed as it was with heavy furniture—the vaultlike wardrobes and diamond-tufted divans, with Mama’s library of ledgers, Papa’s journals and mystical books, the newspapers in a Yiddish I could barely read; though I soon enough absorbed the headlines of their American counterparts: RITES OF FLAMING YOUTH EXPOSED, SACCO AND VANZETTI FRY—items suggesting that the world was full of a number of things unaccounted for in Mama’s budgetary meditations or the harebrain researches that kept my father away from home so much. Occasionally the perfect harmony was disturbed by an invasion of my papa’s family (my mother had brothers but nobody knew where they were), or anyway those members of it that had not been seduced by the Bolsheviks or scattered upon reaching the shores of America. They consisted of Grandpa Todrus and his wife Chana Bindl, both apparently shellshocked from their encounter with the New World, and their daughter, Shinde Esther, youngest of an otherwise exclusively male brood. Papa had brought them over from Russia, settled them comfortably in a nearby residence, and had them outfitted in factory-fresh ready-mades. But the young men, emancipated after their long confinement to shtetl and steerage, set off (as who could blame them?) in their several directions to seek their fortunes. Only the plain Shinde Esther, whom my mama took under her wing like a little sister, stayed at home to care for her infirm parents. But distraught as they were—Todrus complained of a lingering seasickness, Chana Bindl of harassment by the ghost of her mother-in-law—even their visits stirred my restlessness, if only for the fishy odor that clung to their clothing bespeaking a voyage from distant lands.
I was sent to a local school, an academy, along with the sons of garment manufacturers and department-store magnates. They were a toffee-nosed, knock-kneed lot in their tub suits and riding breeches, predestined by their families for high-toned professions, and I disliked them from the start. You wouldn’t have called me a bully, exactly, since the kids I picked on were usually bigger than me, but I quickly established a reputation for being incorrigible. Often I was sent home with notes to my parents that I made certain they never received, and frequently punished for what my teachers called poor deportment. They were feeble punishments, cloakroom detention and half-hearted paddlings, that only made me the more defiant. When my teachers, nervous women despite formidable busts and behinds, complained that my behavior was a waste of a good mind, I got even with them by refusing to learn anything at all. There were also girls in my school, some of them pink and comely, but for reasons I never examined I begrudged them their prettiness, as if they’d cultivated their attractions only to taunt me with. Often I was truant, trolling the uptown streets in search of an unpredictability that always eluded me in my own neighborhood. Then sometime during the summer of my sixteenth year, my papa, ostensibly to keep me out of trouble, invited me to come work in his ice house on Canal.
As the first facility in the city to manufacture industrial ice, Karp’s Ice Castle (no longer New) had once been the pride of the ghetto. But competing houses had since sprung up like mushrooms all over town, while the advent of the refrigerator (five dollars down and ten a month) had diminished their need to exist at all. For a while Karp’s had tried supplementing the sale of ice with a sideline of frozen custards, the proprietor himself having custom-built for that purpose a servo-motorized ice cream – making machine. But Karp’s Frozen Delight, sold in swirls to look like the Statue of Liberty’s torch, could never compete with the near monopoly of Good Humor wagons circulating throughout the city. Still, many families remained dependent on their outdated ice boxes, and though the fleet had been reduced in favor of expanding the storage capacity of the warehouse, Karp’s delivery vans endured as a staple of the East Side’s congested streets. Thus, while Papa’s business had to struggle to maintain its standing in the industry, it remained a going concern that continued to keep the wolf from the door. Not that it concerned me a whit whether the business succeeded or failed, nor was I especially eager to enter my papa’s employ, but I leapt at the chance to smirch myself with something akin to real life.
The old Tenth Ward, as I came to understand, had changed since my parents’ greenhorn days. For one thing, the rag trade, grown ever more prosperous, had moved steadily uptown so that the sweatshops were no longer as prevalent in the area. Many of the original immigrants, having unshackled themselves from pushcarts and sewing machines, became shop clerks, office hacks, bookkeepers, and the like, while those who stayed in the factories also saw improved conditions owing to the ascendency of the trade unions. Their children were moving out of the ghetto altogether—across the river to Williamsburg, uptown to Harlem and the Bronx—and since the government had had its fill of foreigners and put the kibosh on immigration, the old neighborhood enjoyed a bit more breathing room. I don’t mean to suggest that the Lower East Side had become a hospitable place; there was still plenty of squalor and disease to go around, and Prohibition had incited everyone, Jews included, to get drunk. But until Naf the Sport’s lieutenants waltzed into the icehouse to lean on my father, I had supposed that the underworld existed only in films, and it cheered me to discover that Jews could be ruthless as well.
Since the Castle’s inception Papa’s foremen had all been steadfast union men, beginning with old Elihu Levine (deceased) who’d inaugurated the tradition of resisting the arm-twisting of the local syndicate. This was a dicey position to take. But the heyday of the ice plant had coincided with a time when Yoshke Nigger, the ghetto’s chief goon, had withdrawn his energies from the standard extortion rackets to place them squarely in the service of Tammany Hall. Then along came the Volstead Act and Tammany be damned: Peddling hooch was now the order of the day. Yoshke’s successor, Naf the Sport, né Naftali Kupferman, however, was a more ambitious breed of felon with a penchant for diversifying. After his mentor’s unnatural death (via cement galoshes), he decided to reactivate old accounts, sending his gorillas to collect tributes from the businesses that Yoshke had exploited in the past. Meanwhile Karp’s Ice Castle still refused to cave in to mob intimidation, while Karp himself, absorbed in his latest pipe dream, paid no attention whatever to the renewed demands for protection gelt.
My papa. Though he had an office adjo
ining his foreman’s on the Ice Castle’s upper tier, complete with a monkey puzzle of pneumatic tubes for sending messages, he was seldom in it, keeping mostly to the so-called laboratory where he conducted his “experiments.” It’s true that he was credited with certain technical innovations, the fruits of which outfitted the ground floor of his gesheft, but any contributions of his to the material world were in large part accidental: The material world was a place he visited for his family’s sake. His employees, if they regarded him at all, treated their titular boss with the deference you’d pay to a holy lunatic. Only once during my tenure at the Castle, where he often passed me with no hint of recognition, did Papa (think of Lon Chaney in The Forbidden Room) drag me into his airless locker to describe the current project. The place was dense with conflicting odors: brimstone and ozone and human sweat; there were shelves of what appeared to be objects out of the Middle Ages sitting cheek-by-jowl beside cutting-edge technological devices: a glass furnace containing a luminous residue next to a crackling electrical transformer, cathodes and diodes nestled among jars of quicklime, asafetida, and dragon’s blood. There were Hebrew texts by authors with names like Abraham the Python lying open across articles on polyphase-induction engines; there was the cot where Papa catnapped and sometimes spent the night.
