Debasements of Brooklyn

by Ira Gold

20

  Sushi Rice

  The experts have been predicting the death of the mob as long as they’ve been predicting the death of the novel.

  Both hang on because they provide pleasures otherwise unavailable in a homogenized, corporatized world. When you need a whore, you need a whore, just as when you need satire you need Petronius or Celine. There’s no substitute in the online pornography or pitiful laugh-track humor from a mass culture that attempts to satisfy the deepest needs with trinkets and pablum.

  And if you got inside dope that the Jets’ quarterback twisted his ankle in practice, you go to your corner bookie rather than to a faceless, taxable casino in the same spirit in which you read Melville’s “Bartleby” to understand how whim and not reason (never reason) is the driver of all important human behavior. To construct a society based on the notion that people always behave rationally and in their own self-interest is an insanity that can only be dreamed up by the most decadent capitalist as he consumes the last remnants of natural resources and pure air on earth. Only reason can lead us to total annihilation.

  But all this means nothing. As you can hear, I wake feeling depressed. I have no idea what time it is. From the windows which peek up to the ground, I can see only darkness that announces night. I hear no squeaking on top of me and conclude that everyone is asleep. But who knows when an older woman like Ariel’s mother goes to bed? It might be nine o’clock, it might be two A.M. I then put all speculation to rest by turning on my phone. It’s eleven thirty. I’ve slept for only a couple of hours.

  Someone clomps down the stairs. I feel sick. If it’s not Ariel, I’m fucked.

  It’s her. A strange shudder of delight thrills me when she appears.

  “Good morning,” she trills.

  I decide to relax, open up a little. “It ain’t exactly morning.”

  “I came down to check on you a few times. You’re cute in your sleep. Did you feel me tickling your penis?”

  Why shouldn’t I have a regular conversation? I won’t be giving anything away. And I’m beginning to believe that she won’t hold my fucking erudition against me. It would be wonderful to verbalize my thoughts without fear of getting whacked. “I was dead to the world.”

  “Your penis wasn’t. It was all ready to go without you.”

  This girl makes me nervous. She had seemed fine when I met her. Now that I put myself in her power, she worries me with her insatiability. Something about this situation intoxicates her with arousal. The booze helps.

  “Are you hungry?”

  I can finally say yes to this.

  “Wait here.” She runs up the steps and comes back with a shopping bag.

  Ariel explains as she removes a dozen foil containers, “I got some sushi. You said you liked it. You’ve had it before, right?”

  I love Japanese cuisine. Soba, yakitori, sashimi all delight me.

  “You’re a large man so I hope I got enough.”

  She must have bought a dozen rolls and thirty individual pieces. Salmon, tuna, mackerel, eel, a feast for a shogun. She has also brought down a large round platter and she arranges the fish in a very appetizing design. She places the platter between us on the bed. If she’s bonkers, she’s stylishly bonkers. The last thing she takes from the bag is a smoky bottle of sake.

  “Dig in.” She puts a small, rectangular plate in front of me for the soy and wasabi dip.

  I haven’t eaten much in days. My hunger returns in force and I finish four pounds of fish and an equal amount of rice in about fifteen minutes. I wash everything down with swigs of the sake. Toward the end of the gorging I become conscious of Ariel examining me.

  I put down the chopsticks. “I’m making a pig of myself.” “No, no,” Ariel encourages. “Go ahead. I ate already.”

  I hesitate. She has no job. She sublets her apartment while she lives with her mother. Yet she spends one hundred dollars on raw fish for a near total stranger. Why this generosity?

  “Here,” she says. “I’ll have this.” She drops a slice of a cucumber roll on her plate while keeping her eyes on me. When I reach for a piece of tuna she nods. “I got it all for you.”

  “Thanks.” Does playing out a Jewish-Japanese mother thing turn her on? Does seeing a ruffian wolf down hand-cut fish do something for her? Or is she a witch attempting to fatten me up for the pot? For that she could have gotten more bang for her buck getting chicken from KFC.

  Yet I finish everything down to the last speck of wasabi. Then I swallow the remainder of the sake. Sated and disgusted, I drop the chopsticks.

  Ariel puts all the take-out containers into the empty delivery bag. “Did you make that list of the things you need?”

  “I’ve been thinking. I can’t stay.”

  A look so stricken crosses Ariel’s face that I think she’s going to cry.

  “I appreciate everything. But I can’t put you and your mother in a position—”

  “We’re in no position,” Ariel cries. “None at all. What position are you talking about?”

  She knows what I’m talking about. But that’s the problem with civilians. They read about all the violence; they see Joe Pesci go psycho on the screen. To them it’s all a movie. No one really throws someone into the trunk of a car where he shits himself. No one really shoots someone in the back of the head or puts a meat hook up an ass. All this is fantasy because you see the same dead gangsters in movie after movie, alive and well. As with death itself, people deny the simple fact that so many killers live in their midst.

  “The Russians don’t play nice,” I warn. “They’ll hit anyone. Family, friends.”

  “No one knows you’re here. They can’t do a door-to-door search.”

  I sit in frozen obstinacy, but Ariel makes a good point. She knows how to take advantage of having the advantage. She rises. At the top of the stairs, she calls back, softly, “Don’t forget that list of the stuff you need.”

  21

  War

  When war breaks out, everyone is guilty. Everyone must take cover. The big shots resort to safe houses, bodyguards, armored vehicles. Lepke Buchalter, an old time Jew boss in the 1920s, hid in a Bensonhurst basement for two years while he orchestrated dozens of hits on suspected rats. During the Castellammarese war, gangsters carried their mattresses from house to house to avoid sleeping in the same place two nights in a row. That battle ended with Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky victorious. They divided the New York Mafia into five families, set up the Commission to settle disputes, and ushered in a period of Cosa Nostra peace and prosperity that coincided with the Cold War.

  When the Berlin Wall fell, however, ambitious law enforcers started to make their names by busting up the old dago rackets, especially in the construction unions, while ignoring the infiltration of the Russian and the Chinese. An Italian name in the papers always satisfied the atavistic imagination of the general population.

  But what really destroyed the mob were changes in sentencing guidelines. No longer did one get four years for cracking a head open or eight years for murder pleaded down to manslaughter. The ability of the Justice Department to dictate life sentences for conspiracy made everyone, from the lowliest soldier to the most influential bosses, flip. Not even the toughest son of a bitch wants to die in prison.

  Our little operation here hangs on by its toenails. Vinnie Five-Five’s crew consists of his sons, Pauli Bones, and IRA. Associates like Frankie Hog and myself round out the team. Vinnie and his sons are made, as is Pauli Bones. The general rule still holds that you need to do a “piece of work”—murder someone—to get your button.

  But even more importantly, you need to earn. Bones, in particular, is a valued employee. He made his reputation as an efficient killer, but his true genius shows through because of the connections he made at pharmacies and hospitals all over the city. Access to prescription drugs is more lucrative and less risky than importing blow or manufacturing meth. Garlic and Double-Down had run the houses and stolen cars for export. IRA peddles counterfeit securit
ies and loan sharks. Vinnie Five-Five gets a percentage of everything and kicks upstairs to Tony D.

  Vinnie Five-Five’s big problem is that business has been (at least he claims it has been) bad. Tony D thinks that Vinnie is either holding out or is incompetent. In either case, Vinnie is “on the shelf,” sent to Coventry, frozen out, by other mobsters. Who knows the truth, but the effect is that we have little backup in this war against much larger forces.

  Mostly our corner of the world has been sleepy and all of us have been lulled by the easy life. I have yet to see Vinnie in full battle mode. He never spent his solitary, paranoid moments figuring out whom to whack next.

  But he’s a gangster through and through and he clips people when the need arises. A punk named Angelo DiMarco, for example, set up a crap game in Vinnie’s territory. I knew Angelo, an idiot who thought he was smart. That really is a death sentence if you fuck around with someone like Vinnie Five-Five. Angelo traveled with a vicious little sidekick nicknamed The Turk (actually a Yemenite). They childishly convinced themselves of their invulnerability mainly because they carried large-caliber handguns. Vinnie imported a shooter from Newark who offed them at their own dice game. But Vinnie is more businessman than hitman, never more so than when business is bad. His main headache now is finding replacements for Garlic and Double-Down. He needs to keep his houses running or he’ll lose such a large chunk of his revenue that he’d never get back into the good graces of Tony D.

  The only reason that Vinnie has not acted on his paranoid hunch about me is because Julius and Gus still like to take me to civilian clubs with them because I attract chicks. In a known mob hangout they do fine because the number of girls attracted solely to mobsters is staggering. In some Bay Ridge places, if you’re not connected you have no chance. And if we beat to death some asshole who’s bothering them, forget about it. After that, they’ll do anything, anything. At these moments, being in the mob makes sense.

  On the other hand, when the Russians and Chinese are cutting up your friends’ bodies, being mobbed up becomes a drag.

  22

  The Christmas Box

  On the second morning of the war, Ariel shatters the calm when she sits on the edge of the bed. “Hey, sleepyhead.”

  I jolt awake, eyes wide. She doesn’t know how close she came to having her head ripped off. “You shouldn’t surprise me like that.”

  She sings happily, “You are jumpy for a killer.”

  I yawn and stretch. My body has attracted attention from both men and women since I was fourteen. The men I mostly ignore. Women, however, take any hint of disinterest as a mortal insult. So I don’t ignore. Why should I? They pursue until I weaken, though I can generally stay quite strong, a rock, for about thirty minutes.

  But if we genuinely connect, the game really begins. This is dangerous work because someone might be injured. Not as badly as with a Glock maybe, but plenty of organ damage can be done by two people who care for each other.

  Ariel pushes me back down and lies near me. “I like looking at you when you’re asleep.”

  “You shouldn’t sneak up on people. You might get hurt.”

  “Hoit?” Ariel rolls on her side to face me. “I never thought I’d meet anyone like you.”

  I had said “hurt.” She just imagines the Brooklyn accent.

  And I have never, well rarely, met anyone like Ariel. She has done work on three aborted master’s degrees, has held an office job for years, and has moved back with her mother to save money after being fired. Who lives like this? Yet Ariel does not otherwise act so rationally.

  She has invited me into her house. Has she done this as an act of desperation, because she has nothing to lose? So she adopts a thug. I have no illusions of how I appear to other people. Inside, I may be a person of varied interests and numerous sensitivities. To Ariel, however, I am a dangerous monster in the guise of a handsomish dude with a largish dick. Has she dreams of domesticating me without erasing the primal violence that’s so sexy? Can she paper over my cultureless facade with great art that can then be peeled off along with my clothes?

  And my feelings for Ariel? What would happen in a more normal situation? Let’s say I don’t need to hide. Let’s say we just meet in a café and I let her lead me around a museum which I have been to a dozen times. Let’s say I laugh at her patronizing tone. Would I find her fascinating beyond the initial fuck? Would I think her someone special? Would I find her girlish enthusiasm for life, for adventure, enticing or off-putting? Would I find her wise or naive?

  But I can’t ignore the circumstances of our meeting. Her actions prove brave and self-sacrificing even if they are spiced with desire, desperation, and stupidity. Ariel is something of a savior and my gratitude at her altruism contributes to my being dazzled by her.

  “It’s one o’clock in the afternoon,” Ariel says.

  I pad into the bathroom. Twelve hours of sleep yet my muscles still ache with fatigue.

  “Do you want coffee?”

  I sit down on the bed near Ariel and put my head in my hands. I feel hung over. I nod, but even that small movement of my head causes a shooting pain in my skull.

  She runs upstairs and brings down a mug. I hold the cup tightly, worrying that my shaky hands will spill the hot liquid.

  “Are you sick?”

  “Don’t know,” I gasp. The horror of yesterday’s whorehouse run assaults me. I’m exhausted by the pressure, by the worries for my family, for Judith. Oh, why did I invite that Ivan to visit? In my apartment, my other basement haven, we got high and talked in near silence of life. And now that conversation can summon death.

  It is not difficult to imagine. Vlad would call Ivan to The National, the nightclub on Brighton Fifth Street that Vlad uses as his headquarters. Ivan, I have a piece of work for you, a job. I don’t know how to say “a piece of work” in Russian. But I’m sure that the Russian mob has a delightful way of saying “murder this cocksucker” just as the Italians do. And I’m sure they have all sorts of institutional mechanisms that ensure people carry out orders. It wouldn’t be one of the top organizations in the country if it didn’t have strict quality control.

  Now Ivan is not terrible. Not this Ivan. He has no amusing nickname in honor of the most effective Russian dictator in history. I don’t even know what they call him. Maybe Little Ivan, because he is enormous. Maybe they call him Whitey because of his colorless hair, or Blackie as an ironic comment, though the mob generally limits its irony to slaughtering its own.

  Anyway, this Ivan, my Ivan, would be given an assignment. He would be ordered to kill an Italian. Or half an Italian. The other half doesn’t matter. We had made no secret of our small friendship. We had been soldiers in parallel armies, so low level that we could act like people.

  I had even envisioned an alliance against the Chinese. Ever since Mao broke with Stalin, I figured that the Russians and the Chinese were on a collision course on a number of ideological and geographic issues. I did not take into account the new world order, where the only important consideration is access to resources, money, and the political stability necessary to keep those entrenched in power entrenched in power. War between nations, rather than just on one’s own citizens, is bad for business. Just keep the internal malcontents in jail or dead and all systems function perfectly.

  I should have known that our little enclave between the two big powers would go first. I totally misread the geopolitical forces that are so obvious now, as I hide out in Ariel’s basement. Even Vinnie had warned me against playing paddleball in Manhattan Beach. “You’re setting yourself up,” he had said.

  But Ivan, like me, understands loneliness. We have many of the same concerns. What had surprised me other than the way he combined ferocity and quickness on the court had been his comprehensive knowledge of Russian literature beginning with Pushkin. He worshipped Chekhov and practically memorized all of Gogol. He could quote long passages from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. My own reading, while broader, is not nearly as deep. I had ex
plained to him my system, inherited from my father, of reading every Penguin Classic. He thought it silly until I showed him my library with hundreds of masterpieces. He had said that perhaps one can learn a little in this way. But in the end he thought it disorganized. “You have too much ground,” he criticized. “You jump from age to age like blintz on trampoline.”

  “You must read in the original language,” Ivan had instructed. “Otherwise, you think every writer is your friend from down block. Bakunin, this is not a man you know from corner deli. Only original language captures the courage in voice.”

  In his rough, straining-for-an-original-metaphor way, Ivan has a point. You read a Sumerian epic, go to the French realists, check out Lao Tse, study Livy, and find yourself in Merry Old England with The Canterbury Tales. Sure, you learn what some of the gregarious minds thought of their different societies, but because everything is in the most relevant translation, you can’t help but think that all literature belongs to the American century.

  “If I just read contemporary writers, I’d be stuck in the last 400 years. I can’t be tied down like that.”

  “Motherfucker,” Ivan argued, “if your tradition is any fucking good, you should find enough in 400 years to start own universe. Shakespeare by himself . . .”

  “I can’t tell Dante to fuck off just because he writes in Italian.”

  We had agreed to disagree. We never considered killing each other. Once, while in my apartment, he suggested that only Joseph Brodsky is worth reading of the twentieth-century poets. I replied that Ginsberg (at his best) can ream Brodsky up the ass. So he stormed outside and kicked in three of my windows, and then I ran out with a baseball bat and smashed his car windshield. But mostly our conversations were models of intellectual decorum.

  Ivan last came to my house about a year ago. Maybe he stopped fraternizing because he knew of the coming war. Or maybe he was teaching comp lit at a Midwestern university. His nontraditional background certainly gives him an edge in a job search.