Miss Flowers was not in evidence once Roy and Magic Frank went backstage. The musicians beat a hasty retreat as well, and two cadaverous-complexioned ushers hustled the patrons into the inhospitable night. It was part of Frank’s job to turn off the lights and make sure the doors were locked, so the ushers took off as soon as they were certain all of the customers had gone.
Roy asked Magic Frank if there was anything he could do to help him, and Frank said he could empty the waste baskets from the office and dump them into a garbage can in the alley. Roy consolidated the contents of the several baskets into one and carried it outside, careful to prop open the door with a chair so as not to lock himself out. As he was emptying the trash, May Flowers walked out of the theater into the alley, carrying a bag and a box with a handle. She was wearing a big beaver coat with a small matching hat. Roy shivered in the icy rain.
“Nasty night, ain’t it?” she said.
Roy looked at her and asked, “How do you get all of your hair under that little hat?”
“You mean the wig I wear durin’ my act? It’s in here,” said May Flowers, lifting the box. “There’s a pack of cigs and a lighter in the left side pocket of my coat. Could you be a good egg and take ’em out and light one up for me?”
Roy put down the waste basket, fished a hand into the pocket of May’s coat and dug out a pack of Viceroys and a gold lighter.
“Pull one and torch it, honey,” she said.
Roy put a cigarette between his lips and flicked the lighter. Up close, she looked a lot like his grandmother.
“Just stick it in,” said May Flowers, parting her lips.
Roy transferred the Viceroy from his mouth to hers, then replaced the pack in the beaver coat pocket.
“You’re a livin’ doll,” she said. “Don’t you end up like these bums come in this dive don’t do nothin’ but tell each other sad stories of the death of kings. Merry Christmas.”
May Flowers walked away. Roy picked up the waste basket and went back into the building. Magic Frank was putting a mop and bucket into a closet.
“I just saw May Flowers in the alley,” Roy told him. “She asked me to light a cigarette for her.”
“No kiddin’. What else did she say?”
“That I shouldn’t end up like the men who come here.”
Later, when the boys were in a diner, Frank said, “Wow, first night at the Tip Top and you got to meet May Flowers.”
A scabrous Christmas tree, bedraped sparingly with tinsel, stood by the door.
“Yeah,” said Roy, “but I wish I hadn’t seen her breasts first.”
The Sultan
James “The Sultan” Word died last week. I read his obituary in the local newspaper, one of the paid obits, not a byline in the sports section, which he deserved. The Sultan was a terrific prize fighter for fifteen years, a guy nobody liked to fight, a counterpuncher who made opponents come to him. If he got in with a hard charger who tried to wrap him up, Word would wade in quickly and catch him by surprise. According to the paper, James was one month shy of his fiftieth birthday when he died; no reason for his demise was given.
I remembered that he worked for the sanitation department as a garbage collector back in his boxing days because his income from matches was erratic. The Sultan was a sweet character, a soft-spoken, tan-complexioned, good-looking welterweight with a Ray Robinson mustache and permanent smile. He was given his nickname by Aroundel X, a Black Muslim friend of Word’s, who told James that he resembled a Mohammedan Sultan and was put on earth to dominate any Turks who dared to defy him. I don’t know that James bought into Aroundel X’s concept, but the nickname stuck.
The Sultan and I played chess together on Saturday mornings at Yardbird’s Gym when it was on Magazine Street while my sons worked out on the bags and sparred in the ring. One-eyed Eddie, James’s trainer, let him rest Saturdays and tutored my boys while we played on a card table off to one side. The Sultan played chess the way he fought, shyly, staying away until I made an improvident move, depending on an opponent’s impatience to provide him an opening so that he could sneak in a shot. Win or lose, The Sultan never stopped smiling.
I went to his funeral. It was on a Friday and the weather was awful, raining hard with thunder and lightning and even a little hail. I was one of three or four white men among about thirty or forty black people. After it was over I walked away alone and as I did I noticed a stocky young man with big ears who reminded me of a kid I once knew named Ernie Nederland. I first met Nederland when we were both in sixth grade. We went to different schools, so we ran into each other occasionally, at parties or hanging out at parks around town. Ernie was a good-looking guy, girls liked him even though his ears stuck out, and at twelve or thirteen years old he already had the reputation of being a tough kid. He and I got along well whenever we encountered one another; he never seemed particularly aggressive but it was clear that he thought highly of himself. Nederland’s rep stemmed from his family being connected to The Outfit; his uncle was a federal judge who supposedly was in their pocket, and Ernie’s old man was a big deal in the city sanitation department, which was famously controlled by organized crime.
A few years after I moved away, an old friend of mine from high school told me that Ernie Nederland had become a button man. Ernie owned a gas station on the West Side but he made his real bread by shooting people at the behest of The Outfit. According to my friend, as long as Ernie’s victims were known or suspected criminals, his uncle the judge protected him; even if Nederland was arrested, he was never prosecuted.
I don’t know what became of Ernie. When I was in my car driving away from The Sultan’s funeral, I recalled watching Ernie Nederland in a fistfight on a school playground when we were about fifteen. Nederland kept a grin on his face while he fought, and like James Word he let his opponent come to him, taking punches on his arms and elbows without letting the other guy get a clean shot at his face. I’m sure Ernie lost a fight now and again but the time I’m talking about he slipped every roundhouse right and rabbit-punched the kid hard with his left hand, which he used like a hammer. That fight ended after Nederland dropped the other boy, then picked up a two-foot length of lead pipe he’d brought along and cracked the kid’s skull with it. Ernie never stopped smiling the whole time.
The Sultan didn’t, either. I watched him spar numerous times and fight a half dozen and he was always smiling, even when he got hit. I figured he did this to unnerve his opponent, to not let him know he was hurt, a common enough ploy. I thought it a little bit interesting that both The Sultan and Ernie Nederland’s dad were in the sanitation business. As far as I know, Ernie never hoisted a garbage can so long as he could handle a lead pipe or a gun.
Nederland did tell me a story once, a year or so before I saw him pipe that kid. We were at a party and he noticed that I was watching one girl dance with more than casual interest. She had a ponytail and was wearing a yellow sweater. She was dancing with another girl.
“You know her?” Ernie asked me.
“No,” I said. “Do you?”
“I know about her.”
“What do you know?”
“She’s dyin’.”
I looked at him. “How do you know?” I looked back at her. “She doesn’t look sick.”
“She had a heart operation, got a thick scar on her chest from where the doctors opened her up.”
“She showed you?”
Ernie shook his head. “An older guy I know, Al Phillips, done it with her a few times. He’s seen it.”
It was uncommon for kids in those days, especially girls, to have sex before the age of sixteen or seventeen, but I believed Nederland.
“How do you know for sure that she’s dying?”
Ernie pulled a pack of Camels from a pocket, shook one out, lit it and inhaled.
“Want one?” he asked.
“No, thanks,” I said
.
Nederland blew a couple of smoke rings.
“Al Phillips told me,” he said. “Doctors told her folks after she got out of the hospital a year ago, when she was twelve and a half, that she should enjoy herself for the time she had left. They didn’t say how long that might be. It’s probably why she started doin’ it so young. Her name’s Daisy Green.”
I watched Daisy Green dance. She moved better than most of the other girls.
“Real slinky, ain’t she?” said Nederland. “Al says she’ll do anything.”
He rapidly exhaled a trio of smoke rings and went to talk to somebody on the other side of the room.
The record that had been playing ended and “Good Golly, Miss Molly” came on. Daisy Green and the other girl continued dancing together. I thought about cutting in but I didn’t. It felt strange knowing that she would be dead soon and that she was more sexually experienced than I.
A week after The Sultan’s funeral there was a small article in the newspaper stating that police had arrested a man suspected of having murdered James Word during an attempted street robbery. The suspect, Tyrus Chatmon, had shot James twice in the chest. There were photographs of Chatmon and Word; only The Sultan was smiling.
The Liberian Condition
The day Omar Buell appeared in the schoolyard wearing only a pair of worn brown combat boots and holding a deer rifle is a day nobody who was there will ever forget. It was a windy, cloudy afternoon in late February or early March, just before the bell rang signaling the end of lunch hour. Dirty snow was piled up around the edges of the schoolyard and kids were running around playing tag or, like my friends and I, playing touch football. I was eleven years old and had known Omar Buell since we had both been in first grade. He always wore a wash-faded, longsleeved, checkered flannel shirt buttoned up to his neck, baggy green or gray trousers and raggedy, black and white high-top gym shoes. He didn’t talk much to other kids and never hung around the playground after school. Buell was not an outstanding student, either; he always got passing grades but consistently placed near or at the bottom of the class. There was nothing to really distinguish him except, perhaps, for his hair, which he wore longer than most and was the color of August wheat. Once I heard Heidi Dilg, a girl in our fourth grade class, say she wished she had hair that color.
Omar Buell, naked except for combat boots and holding a Winchester .30-30, shocked everyone. All of the kids stopped playing and stared at him. Omar stood still without shivering even though the temperature was a smidge above freezing. Mrs. Polansky, who taught health and home economics and was a schoolyard monitor, ran into the building right after Raymond Drain, a sixth grader who was infamous for once having taken a shit on the floor in the back of a classroom in front of everybody, pointed him out to her. None of the kids approached Buell, but nobody ran away. He just stood there looking at us, but not at anyone in particular.
“You’re gonna freeze your pecker off!” Jimmy Groat shouted.
A few of the kids laughed, but Omar Buell did not budge, not even his face muscles moved. I put on my gloves, which I’d stuffed into my coat pockets before we’d begun playing football. Several teachers, including Mrs. Polansky, and the school janitor, Bronko Schulz, came out of the school building and stood off to one side, sizing up the situation. Bronko Schulz was a big, easygoing guy who liked to tell the boys what he considered to be dirty jokes. He once asked me why a penis was the lightest thing in the world. I told him I didn’t know and Bronko said, “Just a thought can lift it.” The bell rang but we all stayed where we were.
“What’s wrong, Omar?” said Mr. Brady, an eighth grade English teacher.
Everybody thought Brady was a pretty nice guy. He didn’t shout at kids or tell them to take off their hats or pull up their pants and never told anyone to shut up. If he wanted a kid to stop talking, Mr. Brady would just pat him or her on the shoulder and go on with what he was saying.
When Omar did not respond to Mr. Brady, or even look over at him, Mr. Brady said, “Son, what do you need?”
Miss Riordan, the school nurse, whose father was the head priest at St. Tim’s, handed a red blanket to Mr. Brady.
“You must be cold, Omar,” he said.
The late bell rang. I could see that Bronko Schulz was holding something behind his back that looked like a tire iron.
Mr. Brady walked up to Omar and draped the blanket around his shoulders. Brady did not attempt to take the rifle away from Omar but he put one arm around him and together they walked into the school, followed closely by Bronko Schulz and the other teachers. Nobody said anything to the kids, so we just went back to playing tag and touch football.
I can still see Omar Buell and Mr. Brady walking in the schoolyard with Omar wrapped in a red blanket carrying the deer rifle. I never saw Omar Buell again, but a couple of weeks after the incident Jimmy Groat said that his mother told him Omar had an incurable condition so he had to be locked up in an institution with other incurable nut cases.
The other day I read an article in the newspaper about a Liberian rebel leader who made his men march into battle completely naked carrying only their guns in order to frighten the enemy. He claimed to have been responsible for the deaths of more than 20,000 people, and said that before a fight he made a human sacrifice to the devil, usually killing a child and plucking out the heart, which was divided into pieces for his men to eat.
“Did your mother say what they call Omar’s condition?” I asked Jimmy.
“She don’t know,” he said. “Maybe she just made up the part about him being put away in an institution to make me behave better.”
Six Million and One
Israel Rostov was a high school dropout who worked as a fur cart pusher in the State and Lake building. Roy was eight years old when he first saw him. Roy often accompanied his grandfather, Jack Colby, whom he called Pops, on Saturdays to the furriers’ office that Pops shared with his brothers, Ike and Nate. Their brother Louie, who was the president of the Chicago Furriers Association, which he had founded, kept his office on the sixth floor of the building. The other Colby brothers’ office was on the eighth floor.
Roy would sit on a high stool and cut up pelts with a stiletto-like knife Pops had taught him to use, while his grandfather and great-uncles sat around a marble-topped table and played cards. When Louie joined them, the game was bridge; otherwise, they played three-handed gin rummy.
Izzy Rostov delivered furs on carts from floor to floor. He was a short kid with thick, curly black hair and bushy eyebrows, small dark brown eyes and a huge hook nose that seemed to be trying to escape from his face. Rostov’s thick red lips curved upwards at the corners so that it looked as if he were always smiling, except that his smile more resembled a sneer. He perpetually had a burning unfiltered Lucky Strike dripping from his mouth. Roy was fascinated by Izzy’s ability to talk while never removing the cigarette from his lips, as if the butt end was glued between them.
Rostov called Roy “my little pal,” and stopped his cart to talk to him whenever he encountered Roy in the hallways or in the freight elevator. This usually occurred when Roy was going to or from the eighth floor and the sixth floor to visit with his Uncle Louie. The delivery boy always had a future plan for himself that he told Roy about. Most of the time it had to do with his moving to Miami Beach to hang out in the luxury hotels so that he could “hook up with rich, lazy broads.”
One afternoon, Rostov told Roy he had something special to show him but he couldn’t do it in the hallway. Roy followed Izzy into the eighth floor men’s room. After making sure that nobody else was in the bathroom, Rostov removed from one of his coat pockets a small, black handgun and held it out for Roy to look at.
“This is a .38 caliber snub-nose revolver,” Rostov said. “A very accurate piece of hardware. I bought it from a spook on Maxwell Street.”
“What are you going to do with it?” asked Roy.
; “Stick up a few gas stations, what else? I gotta get a stake together before I travel, buy some slick clothes to impress the broads, you know. I can’t make it on the peanuts these penny-pinchin’ Hebes pay me around here.”
Izzy Rostov tapped the tip of his prodigious nose with the barrel of his revolver, and said, “I might even have enough dough to get my beak fixed.”
Then he laughed and put the gun back into his coat pocket. The ash from Rostov’s cigarette dangled dangerously and Roy was certain it would fall off, but it didn’t. Roy moved further away from him.
“Don’t be frightened, little pal,” said Izzy. “I ain’t gonna shoot anyone. The piece is just to throw a scare into ’em, let the suckers know Israel Rostov means business. I could change my name, too, once I get down South. How does Guy DeMarco sound? Smooth, huh? The broads’ll go for a name like that. Guy DeMarco.”
“You think gas stations keep a lot of cash around?” Roy asked.
“Depends,” said Rostov. “But I got bigger ideas.”
Rostov came close to Roy, mussed up his hair and then walked out of the men’s room. Roy waited for a minute before returning to his grandfather’s office. Jack, Ike and Nate were playing gin.
“Hey, babe,” said Pops, “I thought you were going to see your Uncle Louie.”
“I decided not to. I just went to the washroom.” Roy went over to his stool, climbed on and resumed cutting up pelts.
The Roy Stories Page 24