David Lazar

by Robert Kalich

  The man from Tampa had hunted Eloise down and cut her throat and the throats of her two girls.

  A year later I was still working for the Welfare Department. I had interviewed for positions with The New York Times, The New Yorker magazine, even with the Yankees and the Knickerbockers. I failed each time. So, to make ends meet, I kept my job with Welfare. When I was growing up, I was unaware that there was such a thing as the civil service. My mom’s friends all had degrees, some doctorates. My father’s colleagues were either opera superstars like Jan Pearce and Richard Tucker or religious cantors the likes of Louis Waldman, Arnold Diamond, Moshe Koussevitzky or saturnine businessmen, members of his congregation who only took seriously their balance sheets and their God. For my bar mitzvah, Richard Tucker gave me a PM Two baseball glove, the greatest present in the world I thought at the time. One young man in my father’s congregation wrote comedy scripts for Fred Allen, my mother told me. Years later I learned it was Herman Wouk, the novelist.

  Such a different world from that of my Welfare clients. Most of my caseload were Aid to Dependent Children families. Some were disabled individuals. Some the elderly, classified as “O.A.A.”—Old Age Assistance. A few were Home Reliefs. Two or three were felony addicts from Rikers Island jail. Drugs, violent sex abusers, and limb amputations were abundant. With Social Investigators, what you saw was what there was in New York at midday. Very few cared...

  I did what I could. I was no hero. I too dreamed of a better life. Each week two or three pendings (new cases) crossed my desk. Most of the workers bitched at the extra work. No one in civil service was entrepreneurial. The social investigator caseworker had to read policy and familiarize himself with stuff that took a miniscule amount of intellect. Policy, familiarity, and execution. And at times, a supervisor or a case supervisor had to intervene. For me, it was as easy as taking an exam that required me to name the starting center for the championship 1959 Boston Celtics (Bill Russell).

  One day my Viennese supervisor, Hans Neurath, assigned me a pending. “David, it would be a kindness if you visited this case immediately. The family is in trouble: three children, two boys, a little girl, ages from two to eleven. No man in the house. A woman both physically hurt and mentally abused.”

  What did I know? I was a Jewish kid from a middle-class home. My parents never prepared me for this reality. There I was, hardly shaving more than twice a week, going into the field to visit four broken people. I was thinking on the way home I’d stop at Mr. Pollock’s candy store for a chocolate milkshake with pretzels. I was also thinking of my mother’s home cooking, Friday night’s rib steak with so much else loaded on the dining room table. That’s what I was thinking as I headed over to the Wagner Projects in East Harlem to visit Latoya Earl and her children.

  I knocked on the door, and an emaciated boy opened it. I entered the project apartment and looked around. One look. Two. I quickly moved from room to room. In the bedroom there was nothing but two filthy mattresses oozing stuffing. In the kitchen I opened the fridge. Nothing there but ice. Inside a closet I found one pair of jeans hanging on a hook. I returned to the bedroom. Looked under the mattresses. Three pairs of shoes. Cardboard for soles.

  Tommy, the emaciated eleven-year-old said, “Mister, the reason our shoes are under the mattresses is that it keeps them warm. We haven’t had any heat in three weeks.”

  When I checked out a second closet, a rat the size of my foot ran out. Inside the closet were rat droppings and a Rangers sweatshirt with a large hole in it hanging on a hook. I moved to the bathroom. The toilet was stuffed.

  I raced out of Mrs. Earl’s apartment into a creaking elevator. Rushed out onto the icy street where the wind chill was below zero. I found a working payphone on 123rd Street and Paladino Avenue and called my supervisor.

  “David, do what you can. You know city policy. No emergency grants can be given without writing up the case, and we must submit it and get approval from a case supervisor for what you are requesting. Just write it up when you come in Monday morning, and we’ll discuss it Tuesday afternoon.”

  “Screw this!” I mumbled under my breath. (I would say that to myself countless times in the nightmare Welfare years in my future.) On that day, I telephoned my mom.

  “Mom, do you have any cash in the house? I need to buy some winter coats, shoes and warm socks, blankets, food for a family of four.” That’s how my two-year casework/friendship with Latoya Earl and her three children started.

  Chapter 3

  I met Solomon Lepidus in 1961 when I was twenty-four, and it changed my life. From the day I met him until the day he died, Thanksgiving Day, 1989, for all those twenty-eight years, I was captivated and seduced by him. Solomon Lepidus was not only the action hero my father wasn’t but he led an army of employees, some of them just out of prison. He took men out of some dark and unforgiving somewhere and saved their lives or gave them back their lives or protected them from losing their lives. He was also a retrograde gambler and a whole lot of other not so law-abiding things.

  On my collage I see him, a picture of a mob-connected, street smart, sociopathic New Yorker in the 1960s. One who grew up on the violent streets of the Bronx with gangsters like Frank Costello. “Davey boy,” Solomon would say to me, “the kids in my neighborhood didn’t know they were poor. We played baseball with sticks. Didn’t have money for Spaldings. We were all in the same boat back then. After high school, the smartest kids on the block took the post office test. The dumb ones, like me, we went to work for $6 a week. That’s how come I started working on a jewelry bench.”

  Solomon Lepidus wore thick glasses, was stocky, and extra wide. He might have been mistaken for Ernest Borgnine playing “Marty,” until he opened his mouth. His voice was raspy, deep down in his throat, his vocabulary was colorful, his inflection New Yorkese, and he always had an opinion. I met Solomon Lepidus through Hana Aroni, his mistress. At the time, I thought that Israeli woman was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Still do. I met Hana at The Toast, a singles bar on the Upper Eastside of Manhattan. Within a week, she introduced me to Solomon. She and I had an affair, but Hana was only interested in Solomon.

  Hana worked as a nurse’s aide until Solomon Lepidus extricated her from bacteria and dung. As humble as Hana’s beginnings were, beauty like hers has its own vertical voyage. Once Hana was exposed to Solomon’s wise guy and CEO crowd, guys became unhinged over her. Every man’s doors were wide open to her. But it was Solomon Lepidus who had nailed Hana Aroni to his green-dollar-cross and who told most of the men who were interested, “Stay off the grass.”

  I liked Hana Aroni as a person, but I was never smitten with her. Solomon Lepidus was. He never stopped pumping me for my thoughts on his concubine. “Do you think Hana really loves me?” or “Where does she get the strength. I just spent two hours with her and believe me, Davey boy, I did my job, and now she’s going out with you tonight.”

  There wasn’t a day that went by that I wasn’t aware that Solomon Lepidus was a walking contradiction: from making millions to giving away millions to being friends with the gangster Frank Costello. One night at his steakhouse, when I criticized “the prime minister,” Solomon stood up at his table and in front of an overflow crowd roared at me, “Frank Costello is a great American. He’s saved thousands

  of lives.”

  Solomon couldn’t see that he was a walking contradiction. Of course, so was I and, more often than not, I couldn’t see it either. Nor had Elizabeth, until recently, though she recognized it in Solomon even though he was dead before she and I met.

  Solomon Lepidus was always in bad faith. He was the most spiritually diminished man I knew. Not a word he said could you hold onto. Not a thought that didn’t have two meanings. Solomon helped everyone. He took advantage of everyone. He was the kind of instrumentalized soul that can only be quantified. If you looked deeper into his agenda, you would find nothing but springs, wires and, ultimately
, atrocities. He lived in two worlds: to those he protected, he was a champion amongst men; to those he wasted, he was the devil.

  He was my best friend. My partner. Handicapping college basketball games was an art form as well as a profession to me. To him, gambling was a luxury he could afford to get high on. If I made Solomon Lepidus a hundred thousand, or even more, what did it matter? He’d only find a way to piss it away. It wasn’t the money that he lost gambling that angered me. It was his total disregard for the work I put in to make him that money. Solomon Lepidus was Martin Buber’s I-It. I wanted I-Thou. When I worked in welfare, I was I-Thou, but when I turned to handicapping, I, too, became I-It. I lived as corrupt a life as Solomon. More so! Because I knew every minute what it was I was defiling. Solomon didn’t. He was libidinal, instinctive, Eros incarnate. I was cerebral. I didn’t numb my brain, only my soul.

  In 1961 I also hung out with the promoter, Stickers. He got his sobriquet when he was sixteen and promoting his first dance. He had cut up paper and stuck “Stickers Presents” on every car windshield from 161st Street and River Avenue to 96th Street and Park. The dance was a huge success, and for the next three score and eleven years, Stickers promoted and presented just about everyone in the music business.

  Stickers was 355 pounds of lard, and during the hot New York summer he would drag me down to the iconic music club The Bitter End on Wednesday nights so he could scout talent. He was always searching for artists to manage or promote, make a score with. He found more than his share, yet it didn’t work out most of the time. We would start our evenings off at Serendipity III on 60th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. Stickers would begin with the house favorite, a frozen hot chocolate, then an ice cream sundae, then a thick vanilla malted, then a large bowl of strawberry and vanilla or coffee ice cream with three cherries on top and one kind or another of a chocolate chip cookie. If it weren’t the chocolate chip, it would be cheesecake or layer cake, and Stickers, being a conscientious friend, would always request, “Two long, skinny spoons, please. One for my friend and one for me.” I hardly ever joined in.

  1961 was the year Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris chased Babe Ruth’s home-run record. I see the headline when Maris beat it with “61” on my collage. 1961 was a sea change for me. I hit a home run when I left Welfare for a job on the New York Daily Mirror. It was the year that I lived at 356 West 56th Street, in Manhattan. The six-story building had white bricks, a wobbly elevator, and several fire escapes out front facing the Parc Vendome.

  The one-bedroom apartment was $156 a month, a whole lot more than I could afford on my $48 a week salary. Though the Mirror was a crummy tabloid, to me it was a great newspaper. I worked with hard-boiled, black-coffee-newspaper guys. Aileen Mehle, aka “Suzy,” gossip’s grande dame, Selig Adler, Dan Parker, Lee Mortimer, Walter Winchell—that’s correct, Winchell. I mainly worked for Wicked Walter’s formidable girl Friday, Rose Bigman, and sometimes, because of good fortune, I was allowed to cover celebrity parties. A Page Six type of fantasy job it was. Anyway, I was sitting next to the stout William Randolph Hearst Jr., and near the glamorous Suzy, and dating the captivating Leslie Kore.

  As I told Elizabeth, the only thing I’d change about my life is that I’d never have anything to do with Leslie Kore. Such an idea didn’t occur to me in 1961 when I was sleeping with her.

  On Sundays, Max Asnas’ Stage Deli would serve a thick giblet soup for one dollar. All of my gang counted the days til Sunday when we could slurp that giblet soup at the Stage. You could meet comics there like Dick Shawn and Morty Gunty and Jackie Mason and Henny “Take My Wife...Please!” Youngman; crooners like Steve Lawrence and Bobby Darin and Tony Bennett; actors like Jason Robards and Jerry Orbach. I loved those days. I was broke, and I was meeting all kinds of celebrities and sleeping with Leslie Kore. Leslie had already modeled in front of a white Cadillac in a national magazine ad, showed off her shoulder length chestnut hair in TV commercials, and been plastered on billboards all over the East Coast for a cigarette commercial. She’d been married at least twice, and things were hedonistic and wild and...Yes! Although it was shallow of me, I loved seeing all those grizzled old-school New York Daily Mirror newspapermen getting aroused every time Leslie Kore made one of her spectacular appearances in the editorial offices to pick me up for lunch.

  But I couldn’t afford the $156 rent. That’s where it paid to have a best friend as generous as Santa. Ron Nevins was my closest friend, the one who had anointed me Broadway Dave because of all the fabulous women I had been meeting and dating. A Dartmouth grad, Ron Nevins lived with his parents on Central Park West and worked for his father in the garment district. Ron was nineteenth-century Chekhovian. To him, attending the ballet was like seeing Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays was to me. He would take a jet to London for a lunch date with Georgina Parkinson, a demi-soloist in the Royal Ballet. He had already taken three trips and, in my naive opinion, had more dollars in his backpack than I would put together in a lifetime. Ron wore Scali and Brioni suits, Denoyer ties, went to El Morocco, The Stork Club, French restaurants like Le Cirque and La Grenouille. He knew ballerinas: Allegra Kent, Jillana, Violette Verdy. He knew male dancers: Jacques D’Amboise. Edward Villella. We would frequently go to City Center and sit eighth row center. When I went only with Leslie, it was the last rows of the cavernous balcony. Ron even introduced me to George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein.

  One December night in 1961, we went to the Copa. Matty “The Horse” Ianniello, the future crime boss of the Genovese crime family, his beloved wife, Beatrice May, Solomon, Hana, Morty Lefko (aka “The Colonel”), his wife, Leslie and me. That night Leslie was all legs, long and dangling and attracting attention. Hana Aroni was the most beautiful woman in the world that night. Carmine, the captain of the nightclub, a large handsome man wearing a black tux, was obviously familiar with both Matty Ianniello and Solomon. He seated us at a table out in front so that when the show started, the headline performer, Sammy Davis Jr., shook hands with both men. The comic who opened the show that night also came over to our table and said, “In my entire lifetime I’ve never seen such beautiful women with such ugly men.” We all snickered a little and continued eating our Chinese. The Horse began talking about the recent World Series, when the Yankees beat the Cincinnati team in five games. It was the nineteenth championship in thirty-nine seasons for the Yankees, and Solomon and Matty were bragging about that as well as New York City. The women talked about their favorite films of the year. Matty’s wife, The Colonel’s, and Hana Aroni all loved West Side Story while Leslie’s favorite was Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Then The Horse said, “The best film of the year without a doubt was Guns of Navarone.”

  “No contest,” Solomon Lepidus said.

  All of us got along just fine until the women went to freshen up.

  “I can’t believe the stuff you put up with from that wife of yours, Matty,” The Colonel said. “A tough guy like you.”

  Matty slowly drew his gun from its holster. Jammed the barrel deep into The Colonel’s mouth. “What did you say?”

  The Colonel pissed his pants.

  To me it was funny. I knew Matty Ianniello could be dangerous, but I didn’t think he was going to shoot The Colonel. And he didn’t.

  A year later in Solomon’s office I slowly started to become less clueless.

  Solomon wanted to connect me with Matty Ianniello. “Davey boy, The Horse has taken a liking to you. And by now, you know his reputation. He’s known more for earning than for killing. And you know the way I feel about you. We’re going to offer you something great.” With that, Solomon waved to Joe Bruno, a felon recently released from the Otisville Correctional Facility and who was now Solomon’s new head of security, to leave the office. He then called his secretary in. “Don’t disturb us for at least an hour.”

  “Davey boy, I own several establishments that I want to transfer to you in name.” Solomon pulled what seemed like a legal document from a
desk drawer. “You sign these papers, and you’ll be the owner of these here bars. As you can see, I’m throwing in The Wagon. I heard you took Leslie and Hana there. There are fifteen joints in all. They might be mostly gay joints, Davey boy, but it’s a hundred dollars a month for you for each of them.” Solomon pushed the papers under my nose.”

  “Sign here, Davey boy.”

  I hesitated.

  “What’s the matter, Davey boy? There’s fifteen hundred a month for you for doin’ nothing.”

  I thought of my father preaching to me, “You have an obligation to turn darkness into light, David. That’s what men and women who do something good with their lives do. They turn darkness into light!”

  “I can’t do that, Solomon. My father’s a cantor.”

  Everybody’s Best Friend looked at me.

  “That’s okay, Davey boy. Let’s go eat.”

  Chapter 4

  I’m thinking that even as a kid I relished the real, the nitty-gritty of the New York life. Now, I’m wealthy, but I got here through hard work, headwork, dirty work. I still like and respect working men and women, but I wonder how “real” I am. How far behind have I left that fourteen-year-old boy who told his parents that private schools like Dalton and Horace Mann and Collegiate were not for him? I wanted to go to a public high school. “I don’t want to be with just rich kids, Mom.” My mother recognized that I would always find the super’s kid to make friends with.

  I wanted to go to Commerce, especially when I discovered that Lou Gehrig had gone there. That George Gershwin had gone there. Commerce High School had supers’ kids, poor kids, over fifty percent of the student body were brown and black. My first day at Commerce, September 1951, a Negro boy took the seat next to me in homeroom. He was big headed and sober faced. He wore a starched white shirt, a striped red and gold tie, razor-creased chinos, a blue blazer with a plaid handkerchief in his breast pocket. I thought that strange. The good thing about it was that it made me take notice. Noah Weldon and I nodded at each other. It was chemistry or something. We immediately hit it off.