“Kid,” he whispered, his eyes screwed up behind a smoke cloud, “get out of here, off this island, fast.” I was shocked. Thought the crowd liked me. “Why, what do you mean?” “Look, you’re young. All they want from you,” he said, lifting a shoulder in the general direction of the others in that smoky bivouac, “is your money and your woman.”
Stunned, I looked around that tank full of human fish. Were these angels and guppies really piranhas beneath deceptive markings?
Over there, at the end of the mahogany counter, his legs twisted over one another like a rubber man, an Ichabod Crane—a drunken grin radiating from his fixed jaw—was an English “nature” poet, little known beyond that grave circle.
It could not be him. He was too drunk and too kind, all the time. Collapsed on the bench along the right wall after cursing out some old lady who dared say “Merry Christmas, Mike,” was a loud-mouthed Irish novelist whose latest had just appeared as a film. His pretty, kindly wife and their three-month babe were like a quiet painting next to him, she nursing the infant while her husband slept off his latest drunk.
Definitely not them. Too honest.
Well, the Americans in the bar, sure. Highly suspect, and therefore, no threat.
That left only Max. The ex–mob boss on the run who I thought had befriended me.
Ya! The more I thought about him the more I began to believe Shatzy.
“Listen. I know this doesn’t seem real to you but, I tell you, you’re in danger.”
My eyebrows arched and he ordered a free Advocaat for me.
Max Roachman first attracted my attention because of his heavy New York accent. As I thought about it, it was Carla who was first drawn to him! I remember her saying with that tee-hee little giggle of hers, “You remind me of my father . . .”
“Oh, that little . . .”
He had us up to his place after that first night. His Spanish maid, a quiet older lady, cooked an authentic spread.
Brought over by successive waves of colonizers—the Arabs, Berbers, and Moors—fruits are so prevalent that they accompany most courses.
We began with local wine soaked in sangria, the fruits coming from Maxie’s own trees. Standing on the stone terrace and eyes wandering up to Arenal Palace, I felt very much at home.
His lousy record player was turning The Memory Years: 1925–1950, as this stocky old tough spluttered on about his wild days.
Well, what harm would it do for me to drink his wine and eat his food? (My money and my woman!)
Chomping on my first boar, with potatoes and artichokes, I listened as the old guy reminisced.
He sees me smirking and jumps up. “Here, you don’t believe me,” and he rummages through some old photo albums, his maid looking on from the archway with a sad, knowing look.
Headline: KING OF THE HOBOS HAS PENNY RAIL PASS—TRAVELS ONLY 1ST CLASS. He is shaking hands with railroad officials.
Next: Two dark-haired sisters, one on each side of Max in a nightclub: “Took ’em both home for four days.” Next: Max smiling in an auto showroom, shaking hands with a happy salesman who just sold him a Jaguar MK V and a Jaguar XK 120.
“A good time, kid, but my wife got mad when I didn’t come back home for nine months.”
We eat the paella Valenciana. All the seafood fresh from then-clean bays.
The phono spins off speed.
Over flan and coffee, he worked himself up to his true confession. A small news article tells us about his first murders: two boys in a train yard.
Then, with a flourish, a letter from then New York mayor Bob Wagner, inquiring about Max’s recent operation.
“I got friends, kid.” The books, records, suits, coats, shoes (I sneak a peek into his closets on the way to the bathroom), all “from friends,” some items delivered by visiting U.S. warships, if we are to believe this old crook.
“What happened? I can’t go back. That’s all. Kid, it’s all over now, all over.” (The Memory Years spinning off speed.) “Too much, kid. I was too young.”
But this story came to a bad end, though not quite at that dinner party. I must have known that good old Maxie was fiddling with my girl because, days later, I decided to get past his housemaid and snoop around his flat. To find “material” for a story I decided to write about him.
Against her pleading will and nonbelieving eyes, I talked my way around her objections, saying that Max had given me permission to reread his scrapbook. I don’t remember what I found, but I did invade the man’s privacy and was nearly killed as a result.
Served me right, I suppose, but I guess Max had a shred of compassion left inside somewhere. Days after Shatzy gave me that warning to get off the island, I would see Max everywhere I went. Sitting in a restaurant or a café, or wherever I would be, there Max would be. Staring at me, or visibly pointing me out to some of the notorious Guardia Civil, who we had heard would kill for fifty dollars, the going fee.
That was it. I got the message. Shatzy was right. I left. Oh, by the way. I almost forgot to mention what kept him imprisoned in his little bar. He told me this on the day he warned me to leave and start a life for myself while I was still young.
“Me, I can’t go anywhere,” he told me, his melancholic puppy eyes wet with emotion and smoke.
“It was my big night. I was lead dancer in London’s biggest ballet. The performance was on. It was my call, I froze in the wings . . . I was finished. Here I am, forever.”
Fourteen
Setting a Peanut Man on Fire
COMING OF AGE, 1952
AS A KID SCHWARTZ WAS A NORMAL, IF SOMEWHAT MALICIOUS, mischievous type.
He once set a “Planters Peanut” man on fire, on Broadway.
It was a holiday break, cold but not yet freezing so probably around Thanksgiving. We had taken the long subway ride in from Jamaica and were absorbing all the action that Times Square had to offer to two twelve-year-olds in from the green-carpeted world of the suburbs.
Coming out of the tube onto Forty-second Street, there was a mini playland of machines right next to the porno shop. In those days, porn was illegal so this place was put up as an “art” shop. Selling mainly B&W glossies of bimbos down on their luck—to us each a beauty, a masturbatory beauty, good for many hours of holiday fun.
Invariably the perverts who liked young boys stalked this recreational area. They would watch us, Schwartz the tall kid and me the pip-squeak. He would have the “nerve” to leaf through the thousands of glossies and girlie mags while I just hung on his side nervously stealing glances, expecting to be tossed out any minute.
As we exited, some gangly perv in a beat-up overcoat would approach us.
“You men want to see a real collection of girlie pictures?”
“Ge-get away from us . . .” said S.
“No. Don’t be afraid. I mean it. I’ve got pictures and movies of girls, naked girls in my place if you want to see them.”
And with a push, the perv would see his prey flee.
Up in the clear light of day we’d breathe freely again, taking in the mobs of neon and food smells and cops and horses and horseshit.
So S needed a little fun after the run-in with the queer. There it was! A poor man walking down Broadway with a papier-mâché peanut body and top hat, complete with tux tails, and his little cane of peanut brittle tapping the mica-chipped sidewalk.
Taking out his Zippo lighter, my big bad friend snuck up behind the guy and trailed him, all the while scratching the flint to ignite a flame on the rear of the man’s shell.
Of course the man inside the peanut outfit yelled at the kid. And his frightened eyes touched me, forcing me to grab S’s hand to stop. But shaking me off he pursued his prey, his lighter clicking until the shell had ignited, if but slowly. And then as we ran away, we saw the poor man tear his shell off and throw it in the gutter just as it roared into flame.
So this was no little prank. The kid was a vicious punk, no doubt about it. And I, always self-thought of as a “good” boy, w
as little more than a co-nastyholic, somehow egging the principal on with my protestations.
Not to explain us away or anything, but, more for the record, I want to explain how he got that way. He wasn’t born mean or anything, but became that way largely due to his crazy mother.
And she wasn’t to blame.
It was those Benzedrine shots she got from that doctor in Jersey who was helping her lose weight. That set her off for four to six hours, leaving the family in a nightmare by the time darkness rolled around.
I remember one winter night in particular. It stands out so clearly because his life as a boy ended.
We had both gone to his house about five o’clock after an afternoon of play.
His mother was nowhere to be seen. Calling for her all around the “sprawling” brick ranch house next to Vanderbilt’s old private motorway, we heard a low groan coming from the “living” room.
Once in the usually off-limits room, I quickly took in the white sofa and side chairs hermetically sealed in thick plastic, the curio cabinets and other middle-class trappings I associated with great wealth—and then she charged like a mad cow.
“Look what you did to my wrists,” she hollered. “Look how you scarred them, made them bleed.” And she tried to scratch his eyes out!
I stood horrified.
They struggled and we ran out. When we came back, after about thirty minutes of walking around in the freezing dark streets, she was, again, nowhere to be found.
So we just tiptoed up to his large room and talked real quietly to each other and to his younger brother, then ten but still referred to as “the baby” by his parents.
About seven o’clock his father, “Sy,” came home, exhausted from his day on the truck he owned as a franchisee. The minute he crossed the door, the Benzied-up woman ran up screaming, “Sy, Sy, look what your son did to me,” and she then broke down sobbing, all the time muttering that my friend had beat her with a chain!
Naturally, Sy charged after his eldest son. Yelling at him, “You can’t do that to your mother, I’ll show you.” He cornered him in the upstairs bedroom.
As the younger brother and I watched in total shock, father and son came to blows.
Throwing real punches, they fought to a draw, the father satisfied that he’d fulfilled his duties, the son shaking with rage.
And then poor S grabbed for his oversize piggy bank, an object I had envied for years.
Holding it up in the air for what seemed like a very long while, I sensed his life as he knew it ebbing away. His eyes were torn and confused, filled with rage and self-doubt, eyes I would not see again until years later when I would visit him in the psycho ward at Fort Dix after his breakdown.
But then, on that horrid night in Queens, he was just an unlucky kid who threw his glass bank to the floor with a crash, a childhood of coins flying every which way on the cool turquoise carpet.
(As the truth later came out, his drug-maddened mother, it seems, had beat her own wrists with the dog chain earlier in the day! Even going so far as to have cried to the postman at noon, telling him what her son had done to her!)
Fifteen
Pennies for Beethoven
Morning sleep, afternoon wine . . .
Much idle gossip with women
JEWISH ADMONITION
WOMEN TALKING AROUND THE KITCHEN TABLE. THE SOUND of a serrated bread knife gently caressing the fallen crumbs across the thick plastic table cover. Back across the plastic cloth, the crumbs sifted and sorted, women’s voices, didactics towards the ever-changing truths.
I, the male child, listening from the living room, or from the refrigerator. Listening to the women talking. Not businesswomen, nor career women, but housewives, later called “homemakers” (and were they that!), now again, “Mom!”
Addicted to that sound, and today’s men too busy cheating each other to bother with such chitchat. No matter how I’ve tried, I seem to find myself listening to people listening to my voice . . .
It is late afternoon, very late.
I am very well dressed aboard the Larkspur Ferry. A high-speed, yacht-like vessel, mind you, not a dumpy Staten Island plow horse, with a lusty mustachioed Greek concessionaire pouring giant drinks at three in the afternoon. Soft plush seats, but I sit and walk outside gazing at the cormorants and gulls, the windsurfers who’ve recently discovered this channel, the Redwood rowing team dreaming of the Charles, and, to my satisfaction, the beginning of the early evening traffic crawl on 101 halfway up the low-rolling hills of Marin.
Sighting the haphazardly buried shore pilings with algae growth I think, “God, but I love the water.” Always with a sense of loss, for something not quite present. If I love the water and I’m at the water, why feel a sense of incompleteness that I ought to be living on the water in order to enjoy the water? Why not “be here and now” and have the water.
So I take my big drink to the upper deck, observe the bay’s green tint today, sigh for the weaker prisoners, reflect again on the remarkable piece of real estate under San Quentin State Prison, and settle down to enjoy the ride.
Clear to Vallejo and beyond, the rich, volcanic wine lands.
A looping gull riding a wind wave not rippling a feather. His sense of energy total and not classroom bought, Russell, my son, eighteen in May, enjoying his last few months of his senior year at Redwood, driving his perfect old Mustang, stealing perfect white bases, enjoying his popularity as the all-American boy.
Tomorrow night’s the junior prom. He’ll be taking a “rich” girl from San Francisco to her school’s dance. She’s been calling him for about a week; he’s sort of avoiding her, because he told me last week on our drive to the shooting range at the Circle S Ranch, out in Tomales, she’s not quite pretty enough.
Yes, she’s fun. Yes, she’s intelligent. Yes, she’s kind to him. But not quite pretty enough.
I tried to suggest that perfect looks come at a high price, that the less-than-beautiful women are often the best friends . . . and then let it go. Our interest soon shifted to the thrill of killer rifles ripping paper targets. The smell of gunpowder, the frightening report of large bore guns, and the crazy types who always appear.
Since early on, I’ve known I would be no good at business. I lacked the Midas touch, the ability to sell, the desire really to cater to people. Maybe I’m basically the “lazy Mexican” my father thought I represented. He often told me I reminded him of a Mexican with a sombrero falling asleep against a wall. Sunny, I hope, and besides, all the Mexicans I’ve met have been remarkable, hard workers! They work like ancient Israelites with uncanny stamina, uncomplaining.
Lawyers love to fee me $275 an hour, or $4 a minute while driving through the Sausalito tunnel. Their car phone, cellular Captain Marvels. The higher the fee, the wiser the man, right?
“Pennies for Beethoven” is how Janet put it, when I complained about my lack of hourly consulting fees. SO I stopped as soon as I started. Melted the plastic shingle.
Now I just dream like the biblical prophet my father confused with a cartoon “lazy Mexican.”
Sixteen
The Speculator (in a Garden of Numbers)*
HE WAS NOT OF A WEALTHY FAMILY. HIS FATHER, A SMALL shopkeeper, now dead, had managed to rectify his penniless immigrant childhood position but never managed to attain what was known as a “comfortable” status. The son was warned about investments at an early age. On one of their many summer rides in the Catskill Mountains, they both watched a raceway being dozed and carved out of a distant cornfield. The small father lectured the smaller boy, “Sure, they move a little earth around, get you to invest in their scheme, and after they’ve milked the public for all they can get they declare bankruptcy. They can keep their racetrack.”
The small boy believed his father’s every word. He worshipped the forceful, handsome man for his ability to say loudly what he felt, not just within the confines of the household, but outside as well. The man knew what he was talking about and told you so.
The raceway was slowly but certainly constructed and eventually operated very successfully. Those who had purchased “shares” in the embryonic raceway corporation were rewarded for their faith with substantial capital gains. The son never mentioned the completed track to his father, though they would pass it each summer over the years. There would be no point in proving his father wrong; he was right about too many other things for this error to have any impact on their relationship.
As the little boy became a man, his father grew neither more rich, nor more poor. His income remained the same throughout the years, rising just slightly with inflation. The small family home was always secure, the children had enough money to attend a municipal college, and the two parents, with simple wants, were able to “go away” every summer to a bungalow in the mountains. The family dry goods shop was managed with honesty and without credit, and provided a moderate but secure income.
The father would justify his moderate position from time to time. As one friend or another would move to a more expensive home, take a cruise, or purchase something truly showy, he would lecture the boy, his daughter, and his wife about his friends’ foolishness. He simply did not believe in the American Dream. He smelled a fraud, but was unable to prove his suspicions until many years later.
One of his friends, a corpulent man he had grown up with on the Lower East Side, went bankrupt. The journey back from his expensive home “out on the island” to one room in a poor relation’s apartment with his three children took less than one year. It seems that women no longer knitted as they did during and after the second war. The little man’s children were pulled out of school to earn their food while the once-prosperous yarn merchant became a clerk in a competitor’s shop.
Sadly, the boy’s father took pleasure in his friend’s plight. “I told you he was overextending himself. All the years he came in here and shot his mouth off. Look where it got him . . . all the time borrowing from Peter to pay Paul . . . I knew all along it was no good.”
A Savage Life Page 7