Debasements of Brooklyn

by Ira Gold

  The brick of weed I squeeze into the inside pocket of my jacket. The gun I put in my waistband. The porn and Dad’s favorite books, the few he particularly mentioned to me, I place in the suitcase. Back upstairs, I ask Judith, “Where should I leave this?”

  “Put it in the storage closet.”

  As I drag the overstuffed suitcase to the second floor, memories of all the times I had kissed Judith’s girls good night flood my mind. They wouldn’t go to sleep unless I came up. Afterward I’d keep Judith company while John was out trying to drum up business. Mostly he was trying to get laid and succeeding in getting drunk. But with me around, he posed no threat to Judith when he got home.

  Judith often advised me to have my own family. Instead I started doing more and more work for Vinnie Five-Five, got heavy into selling weed, and Judith stopped telling me that I should have children.

  Judith waits at the foot of the stairs.

  “I’ll come back and pack the rest of my things as soon as I can.”

  “NO,” she shouts. “Not till this is over. I’ll put everything in boxes, even the books, and ship them to wherever you want.” Judith thinks I keep the great literature, as I do the porn, for sentimental reasons. In fact, she’d be far more shocked to learn what I do with the books than what I do with the porn.

  I hug her good-bye. “I’ll hide, but I’m not going far. Keep alert. Call me if you even suspect that something is not right.”

  But Judith doesn’t give an inch. “You stay where you’re safe. Do not go on the street for anything.”

  “Sure. Remember what Dad used to tell me about curfew?”

  “What?”

  “If you’re not in bed by midnight, come home.”

  For the first time in our visit, Judith smiles without pain. “I remember. We used to be a funny family.”

  24

  Tighter, Baby, Tighter

  The tense, sad visit relaxes me. Though the same danger exists now as before, I worry less. This war, like all wars, will end. A few survive even the most brutal conflagration. With no supporting evidence, I tell myself I will be one of the lucky ones.

  I even conjecture that the hit on Julius will slake Vlad’s immediate thirst for vengeance. He might not want to risk his men in our neighborhood now. He might even go so far as to offer surrender terms to Vinnie. Leave town and he won’t kill the rest of the family.

  Vinnie’s response will be a measured, go fuck your mother when her cunt is momentarily free.

  On the walk back to Ariel I’m vigilant but not crazed. No taxis scare the shit out of me. I appreciate the blocks of tidy houses, the porches with bench swings, the stamp-sized lawns with a single rose bush clinging to a home’s brick front. I pass a grandmother pushing a carriage and I say hello. Surprised and pleased to be acknowledged, she returns the greeting. I feel like a prisoner on furlough who gets a glimpse of the free world. Bittersweet.

  I arrive back at Ariel’s place no problem. I check to see if anyone is following before I slip in the side door and walk down the steps.

  Ariel hangs right where I left her. At first I think she’s unconscious. Her chin rests on her chest and she isn’t moving. But as I get closer she lifts her head and whispers, “I knew you’d come back.”

  “Yeah. How you doing, baby?”

  “I need you.” She croaks as if she’s dying.

  “Are you turned on?” I am curious.

  “Untie me, baby. I’m begging you.”

  “You don’t have to beg. I’ll be happy—”

  “Please, you win. Whatever you want.”

  She wants to beg. It’s part of it. So I go with it. If this is what she enjoys, who am I . . .

  I unlock the cuffs. She collapses into my arms. Weakly, she orders, “Help me to the bed.”

  I reach to take off the blindfold.

  “Don’t touch that, damn it,” she snaps, instantly forceful.

  I lay her on the bed. She wiggles her freed hands but otherwise doesn’t move. Then, with impatience in her voice, she pleads, “Don’t hurt me. I’ll do anything you want.”

  “I could use a cup of coffee.”

  This is not the right answer. Ariel tenses as if I had slapped her. So I demand, “Suck my dick.”

  She gurgles with pleasure. “I can’t see. Put it in my mouth.”

  Even without the coffee, the prospect of a blow job arouses me. I have half a hard-on by the time my penis bumps against Ariel’s mouth. I expect her to swallow it in one gulp. But she keeps her lips tight.

  “What the fuck . . .” I’m annoyed. First she builds this elaborate scenario, and now she refuses to go through with it. The bitch is totally bent.

  But it takes only another few seconds to realize she wants me to force her. Ah, the line between foolishness and sexual daring is a fine one.

  The other women I banged wanted to kiss and cuddle. We’d feel each other up. Maybe a nip of a nipple brings a gasp or a hard thrust a shriek. Back then, when I had less on my mind, Ariel’s imagination would have excited me. I would have happily taken it as far as Ariel wanted.

  But in the middle of this war, with Judith on the verge of a nervous breakdown, with Vinnie Five-Five no doubt organizing a revenge sortie, I can’t fully concentrate on Ariel’s elaborate fantasies. I remember one time a big dude called Nicky Thumbs, because he specialized in breaking said digits in those who refused to pay what they owed, came in and said his new goomah wanted him to smack her around. Nicky Thumbs, a ruthless gangster, hesitated. He tells us he never smacked any woman except his wife. But this girl likes it rough, so he hits her, but gently, more pushing around than a beating. Now Nicky Thumbs is laughing when he tells us this. She tells him he’s a pussy and that her grandmother used to hit her harder than that. So Nicky cold-cocks her and knocks out two teeth. When she comes to, she says, Nicky, not so hard. He concluded. No fucking way to make these bitches happy, no matter what you do.

  That’s the only other story I know that approximates my own situation. Nicky Thumbs found himself a different mistress. I, on the other hand, am not in a position to switch chicks. Besides, Ariel interests me. Her chest alone makes her worth a little aggravation. But she’s not just tits. She has soft brown hair with a little wave, large brown, blindfolded eyes, and a trussed body. She’s educated, interested in art. She saved my life. Or at least she has made the offer.

  She also sees me as her sex slave. Who wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to have one? Like all decent people, she has urges and fantasies that terrify her. Onto me Ariel has writ her most outré desires, wishes to live out lifelong scenarios. A chance like this may never come again. I admire her for having the guts to grab it.

  Maybe because I’m a gangster she believes I would have little objection even to the most depraved situations. She may believe that being a criminal automatically makes me a subversive in all ways. She doesn’t know that gangsters have the politics of hillbillies. No profession is more reliant or supportive of the status quo—merciless to criminals, antichoice, untrammeled access to guns. It takes a lifetime, short though yours may be, to master the system and find its weak spots. If we lived in a society where any degenerate gambler or restaurateur could get a bank loan, it would destroy the shylock business, the most dependable revenue generator in all of Mafiadom. If prostitution and drugs were legal everywhere, how could some poor street kid with dyslexia compete against corporations armed with marketing professionals and tax lawyers?

  Like everyone else, gangsters depend on a consumer society where people sacrifice their lives in order to buy junk they don’t need. What good would it do to steal truckloads of electronics, clothes, toys, and in the case of my idiotic uncle, canned tuna, if people were satisfied with what they already owned? In fact, people clamor for this junk because it’s hot. One guy I know, Sal Gecko, purchased designer knockoffs and convinced people they were the real thing simply by telling them he stole them off the back of a truck. Sal is a great earner, very respected.

  On the who
le, gangsters reinforce the power structures that they battle to the death. We exist because of money. True hoods are workaholics, looking for new angles, new scams, new suckers, twenty-four hours a day, just as any compliant corporate executive does. Even if I were fully Italian I could never be more than a mook, a hanger-on, because of my suspect attitude toward the dollar. As soon as I began to think that other pursuits might bring more happiness I made myself an outcast. Vinnie Five-Five simply can’t understand this while the others, especially the late Julius, had viewed me with contempt. It’s really what drove us apart.

  So by chance, simple luck, Ariel has hit on the one mob associate who is both eager to question societal norms and also willing to explore the master/slave dynamics erotically. It’s only because of everything going on that I can put neither my full heart nor my fully engorged penis into the endeavor. For example, at this moment, my distraction causes my dick to wilt in the face of Ariel’s closed mouth.

  I pinch Ariel’s jaw. This forces her mouth open and releases her tongue. Finally she begins licking my shaft. If she hadn’t, I would have wrapped things up, put my schlong back into my trousers and told Ariel to fuck herself, whether that turned her on or not. But her tongue moves smoothly back and forth in wet, gentle strokes. It sends shivers through me. Soon I forget the little annoyances and lose myself in the pleasure. I even shove my hardened prick into Ariel’s mouth without a word of thanks.

  She loves it. She maneuvers my dick against her soft palate and I grant her a few kind words, “Do it, you cunt. Suck, bitch. Suck.”

  She inhales, creating a wind tunnel that vibrates around my penis. I’m now kneeling over her blinded eyes and she reaches up to fondle my balls. By the time she sticks her index finger between my butt cheeks I’m coming into her mouth. She releases me and my jism squirts all over her, all over the bed, onto the floor and the low ceiling.

  When I’m done, she grabs the back of my neck. “Go down.”

  Her panties are so wet that I have to pry my hand between the cloth and her skin before pulling them off. Then I gently lay my head between her legs and my tongue rakes the walls of her slit. She explodes instantly. And she keeps exploding, five, six times. She stops for a second so I lift up my head to pick a piece of curly hair from my lip. But she pushes me down again and my mouth brushes her vagina once, twice . . . After another few seconds she begins writhing, breathing rhythmically, and then stops. Each successive time the orgasm becomes shorter. Each time, she grabs my head and crunches it between her legs. After a half-dozen repetitions, she kicks me away and finally removes her blindfold.

  Her glassy look slowly, very slowly, dissipates, and is replaced by adoration. “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For playing along.”

  “Forget about it.”

  She smiles. “Lie down.”

  I realize that except for my dick hanging out, I’m still fully dressed. So I kick off my shoes and squish close to Ariel on the narrow bed, nearly pushing her up against the wall. She doesn’t mind. She places her hand inside my shirt. “So how’s your sister?”

  “Fine. Terrified.”

  “Of what?”

  “A couple of assholes stopped by the house. Nothing happened, but they killed Julius. Stuffed his corpse in a dumpster.”

  Now she leans up against me and touches my cheek. “Was this Julius a friend of yours?”

  Gangsters don’t really have friends. If you’re going to get whacked, it’s usually those closest to you who do it. They know your habits, your hangouts, your routine. They don’t raise your suspicions despite being angels of death. We still hang out, steal, intimidate, kill, and kibbutz together for almost all our waking hours, for without gangs there would be no gangsters. We sometimes forget ourselves and talk about what we think or, more dangerously, what we feel. But the smartest thugs keep their mouths shut. Secrecy, like surprise in battle, is a devastatingly effective tactic. Why give that up?

  “I knew Julius since we were baby punks twenty-five years ago.”

  “Were you still close?”

  “Sure. Blood brothers.” I recall his behavior in the car on the way to the Russian bordello. By military or mob standards he acted well. I, however, despised him.

  Ariel might not be used to people talking ill of the dead. But then she hadn’t known Julius.

  “What are you going to do?” Ariel keeps her eyes glued on me as I pop off the bed to pace. “Don’t you have to get revenge for your friend?”

  This stops me. “What?”

  “An eye for an eye. Isn’t that like the Mafia code?”

  That’s Hammurabi’s Code. The Mafia’s code is an eye for a toenail. But like everyone, we enjoy taking revenge if it’s easy and involves little danger. Vlad’s army poses a problem.

  Still, Ariel has a point. In turf wars, all sorts of tit-for-tat slaughters occur. Getting whacked is one of the risks of being a wise guy, just as patent expiration is for drug companies like Pfizer, another piece of shit stock I have the misfortune to own. Its labs couldn’t find a pill to stop heartburn, never mind discover a compound to prevent heart attacks.

  I start my little march again. No. Vinnie Five-Five will not take his son’s death with the equanimity that everyone else who knows Julius will.

  He’d reconvene his crew and send us out with orders to come back with the heads of our enemies. I want no part of this. For reasons I can’t fully explain, murder repulses me. I doubt I can even use my lovely little Glock.

  But why? These are the meanest sons of bitches on the planet. Plus I never held straight society in high regard. Its pieties about peaceful coexistence are grotesque hypocrisies when you consider the savagery it perpetrates the world over, mostly against civilians who do no harm. And this isn’t just the United States. Every culture commits atrocities with sanctimonious glee. Why, in the defense of my society, my crew, should I prove any less bloodthirsty? I put some arm on people when necessary. Where cops can never be involved, where others would knock the shit out of you if they could, protecting yourself and your interests is a moral imperative.

  On the bell curve that runs from conscienceless killer to mindless pacifist, I always believed that I chart in the middle. Yet Vinnie, a decent judge of character, made me the driver and not the shooter. I’m no shooter. I’m not much of a driver either, but I’m no shooter. I must consider the possibility that along with Quakers and residents of the Upper West Side, I fall in with the outliers on the pussy side of the graph.

  “I love you,” Ariel says, and then adds quickly, “Not forever, but for this second.”

  Ah, shit. How absurd.

  She laughs and pulls me back into bed. “Don’t worry. Whenever I have multiple orgasms with a guy, I always fall in love. It doesn’t always last.” She rubs my face. “You fucked me blue exactly the way I wanted. So what if your emotions are as frozen as your tongue.”

  I close my eyes. My mind leaves the Vinnie Five-Five situation. Ariel is a decent, brave, honest woman who not only risks her life for me, but took a chance by letting me into her most primal, and potentially embarrassing, desires. In return, I should not be frightened or ashamed to verbalize. I should have no fear of merging the internal with the external.

  But I can’t. Not yet. Habits, especially ones that provide chameleon-like cover and preserve life, die hard. Now, Ariel’s basement vacillates between a cozy sanctuary and a claustrophobic dungeon. All life is a dualism. Some call this symmetry the essence of beauty. Others call it a pain in the ass.

  Ariel goes into the bathroom and I hear the water run as she washes off. She comes back shiny and smiling. “Do I scare you?” she jokes. “Not scare you the way those guys who killed your friend scare you. I guess . . . guys get most terrified when a woman says she loves them even in jest. They panic when they realize they have no idea what they feel.”

  “I like you.” Should I say something about my dreams? “Or I wouldn’t be here—”

  “I know you like me.
We like each other. We’re different, or at least our lifestyles and interests are. But men are all bluster. You’d be surprised at how many guys wouldn’t dare to blindfold me, tie me to a pipe, and leave me hanging.”

  “Pussies.”

  “Nothing freaks you out. And that’s not just because you’re a gangster. I knew right away you’d do anything . . .” Ariel fishes for my take on the situation. She wants to know if I am going to spank her or do whatever else turns her on. She wants to know if I’m going to stick around.

  But she pries no further. She kisses me on the cheek as if she were my wife. “Don’t say anything. I know you operate more instinctually than I do, without having to formulate words or probably even thoughts. I’m going shopping for my mom. Maybe I’ll see you when I get back. Maybe not.”

  With that she goes up the steps.

  25

  The Way it Was

  In the old days, mobsters would hide out together during war. Sometimes they’d “take to the mattress,” that is change houses every night. Or soldiers would make bunkers out of their own homes. War could never cross a man’s threshold. Get caught on the street, go shopping for a tomato, and you would be whacked as it is being weighed. But play cards in your living room and you would be as safe as an infant in her mother’s arms.

  Also, during wartime, business stopped. Your hijackings, your bookmaking, your shylocking, your whorehouses all need to be put on hold until you could leave your bedroom. Outside guns have to be hired, and mercenaries do not come cheap. Every crew had to kick in for them. The added expenses and loss of revenue ate at the kishkas of all gangsters. You build an operation based on muscle and shaded dice, and because of the stubbornness, greed, or just plain stupidity of a few old men clinging to power with the tenacity of aging lions, years of hard work, endless scheming, and life-threatening risks atrophy. Every day that you aren’t on the street making collections, taking bets, circulating, your business weakens. So wars ended quickly.