Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  I went in and had a drink with Robert De Niro Sr. who I hadn’t seen for a long time. He took me to his studio and showed me some new work and his little son came to play and I drew a camel and palm trees for him and De Niro Sr. said that artists were saying about him that he was over-influenced by Matisse but that he didn’t understand Matisse and I told him not to pay any attention, that he was one of the best artists in America and that Moby-Dick had sold fifty copies in forty-nine years or forty-nine copies in fifty years and look at where Melville is today and he said, Six feet under, and eternity didn’t help Van Gogh either. We had ravioli at the little Italian restaurant, the same one we’d eaten at before, it was great, I passed Sharon’s house, I called her on the house phone and she said, Yes? I mumbled something and she said, Really, enough already.

  Back home Carole had cleaned my apartment. Beulah Weil, who’d bought my first painting at my first show, called me up. I’d liked her once and she liked me. I’d met her through Jerome Robbins who at the time had wanted to help me make some money. She ran a company that made produced painted cloth patterns. She was twenty years older than me. Before she’d gone back to the family business she’d wanted to be an actress. She’d taught Jerry Robbins acting and had been a member of the American Actors Company, and had also directed it. Beulah helped me and commissioned me to paint cloth for her and I did a few samples of which only one was bought and I brought Gandy in who was better than me and he did a few very good samples that I later saw on lots of dresses, and I hadn’t seen her for two years now and she asked how I was and she said that Dick Zeisler had had dinner with her and had spoken warmly about my paintings and that he’d be coming to pick her up for dinner that evening and she told him she’d bring me along and he got angry but agreed and she wanted me to bring some paintings and then we’d see if he might buy any. I worked on the two paintings that Carole had found and fixed what needed fixing and so that the paint wouldn’t be wet I used a gouache mix. I went to Beulah’s house on Park Avenue and Zeisler’s driver arrived and asked us to come downstairs. We went down and Zeisler was sitting in his Rolls-Royce and he said, Beulah sure knows how to make trouble. We drove to his house near the Frick Collection and went upstairs and I saw an art collection you don’t see every day. Modigliani’s Nude Sdraiato. Two early Chagalls. A dancing landscape by Soutine. Two Matisses, a Chardin, a rare Juan Gris, a Ryder, and a Reuven Rubin sketch. We went into the dining room. The food was fine. The butler who served it looked as old as the Cézanne hanging on the wall facing me. Zeisler said he was bored, that each morning he drove to his office and there was a secretary sitting there with nothing to do—he was making fun of himself and it was touching—and all day she just wrote his name on her typewriter. It’s not nice to be considered a wealthy man and then have nothing to do. Beulah had told me earlier that Zeisler had converted to Christianity in his youth and had been a monk and traveled to Palestine and Syria, but after the war, after what he’d heard about the Holocaust, he’d returned to Judaism and had been married for three days, meaning that he’d left his wife after three days but continued to receive wedding gifts and never returned them. I took out the paintings I’d brought and Zeisler looked at them for a long time and said that when one of my paintings was worth fifty thousand dollars I should come and see him and he’d buy it. Since he knew I was poor he said he’d give me a present. He left the room for five minutes with the aged butler at his heels and then came back and gave me a package. When we got out of the Rolls-Royce that had taken me and Beulah back to her home, I opened the package and found twenty used shirts and a necktie.

  My writing was floundering, it wasn’t good, from the play I’d written I moved on to the story of Hughie and the dog but that was too big for me and so I began another book. I decided I needed a change. Avi Shoes lent me a few hundred dollars and I packed a big bag and went to the Greyhound station at Penn and for seventy-five dollars I bought a pass that would let me travel on any of the company’s buses for thirty days. The idea that had popped into my head was to learn from Oved’s trip, when he had gone to Mexico City just because there wasn’t a bus to Las Vegas. I decided to go wherever there was bus service. The first bus was going out to Illinois. I sat looking at the wide-open spaces in the silence. Every now and then we’d stop for some air and food. At one of the stops, in a small town whose name I’ve forgotten, I got off. I rented a car, checked into a motel, and ate at the local diner. In the evening the streets were empty and I could hear music. A guy was playing the guitar and people were singing country songs with him. I had a drink and the guy looked at me and invited me to join in a song about a lost cowboy. I reached Chicago, walked around the city, it was cold, snow was falling, the lake was vast and a strong wind was blowing in off it, from there I traveled south and passed through states I’d never visited, Kansas, Missouri, I went up to South Dakota, went down to Utah, I’d get off the bus, check into a motel, rent a car, and climb the mountains or drive through the deserts. The vast beauty of nothingness. The power of this big country. The people who didn’t live in the cities I knew—stronger people. Repairing trailer rigs. Milking cows. Fertilizing fields. Hunting. Building log cabins. Stone houses. And there were girls. I was young and so were they. Everything was different and I was amazed that we even spoke a common language. I got off and got on buses and three weeks passed and I wasn’t satisfied, sitting in buses, devouring the distance, the Rockies I climbed were desolation refined into scenery. I’d curl up at the bus stops, drink Coca-Cola or coffee, and just listen. Strangers stuck to one another and talked like brothers though they would never see one another again. There was something magical in all that detachment. In that journey to nowhere. In the absence of contact with everything you once were. I visited a ranch and helped a woman get her car out of the mud and spent a weekend with her near the endless cornfields of Idaho, and it was quiet and warm in the house and the woman, whose name was Cathy, asked what I did and I said I was a tie salesman from New York and she was a teacher, on her own, her husband had gone away and never come back, she was gentle and hungry for love and I gave her as much as I could invent on the spot and finally said I was going and she said sadly that I wouldn’t come back, like her husband, and I said no, that I would come back, and I got on the bus. A few days later I reached the Grand Canyon and from there I went to Louisiana, and then, very slowly, by bus, after lots more heart-to-heart talks with my lost brothers, I got back to New York. Carole and Oved had looked after my apartment and Hanoch and Oved and me and Carole sat down to think about what we were going to do and Hanoch started talking about Israelis, what they’re looking for, how they stick together in a city like New York, and he got the idea of a café. An Israeli café slowly took shape, hummus and tahini, falafel, and the Israelis would come, they’d have a home, and the idea sounded good and we needed five thousand dollars to start up. Avi Shoes said no. Falafel would never fly in America. Israelis should wake up and be where they were or else go back home. I’d known an Israeli woman in Paris who’d studied automotive engineering, a friend of a friend whose name I’ve forgotten. We met by chance on Fifth Avenue and she said that everything was okay now, not long ago she’d married a Jewish businessman called Bernie Cohen. She promised to find out if he’d agree to invest in our café. He agreed, and that should have aroused our suspicions at once, but at the time we didn’t feel like trying to understand his motives. He signed a contract with us. Gave us the money. According to the contract we’d split everything down the middle, half for him and half for us. The checks needed two signatures, his and one of ours. He brought along a huge businessman’s checkbook and asked us to sign about two hundred checks so he could transfer money to us as we needed it. We found a basement on Ninety-first and Broadway. A big filthy basement that had been standing empty for years. For two months we worked day and night on decorating it. We stripped the paint, repainted, and I even did a few small paintings for the walls that we framed. Hanoch built a beautiful mahogany-covered bar. W
e found tables and chairs like those in European cafés, things that weren’t yet popular in New York, and we bought an espresso machine that was also quite a rarity in town. We built a kitchen, a storeroom, we experimented with the kind of coffee we’d use, where in the Arab neighborhood in Brooklyn we should buy beans and oil and tahini and pita bread, and about three months later, when we were almost dropping, everything was ready. We brought in the furniture. We put the espresso machine in its place. For a few days we experimented with making tasty falafel and hummus. Hanoch invented a device that put eight falafel balls into the fryer at once, rather than one, as was the custom in Israel. We worked long and hard to find the right quantities of ingredients, the right frying time, mixing the hummus and tahini, spices, coriander, it was good to work, good not to think, to argue a bit about politics. We brought in some Israeli friends for taste tests, we listened attentively, added more pepper, less salt, more fresh lemon juice and “The Cellar,” as we called it, was almost ready. We brought a record player and classical and Hebrew records together with American folk songs and lots of jazz records. We signed a contract with the Chinese laundry opposite us to wash our tablecloths and towels every night. And then, while we were still working on the final polish, three guys came in who looked like our good friends from downtown Las Vegas. They talked with a Brooklyn accent and asked how’s it going boychiks and said how nice that you’re opening a Jewish café and we said thank you and invited them to have a cup of coffee and they drank it and one of them said, There are a few things you need to know. One, you need protection. We asked who from. There are all kinds, they said. Fifty dollars a month just because you’re one of us. Out of the question, we said. That night our three apartments were broken into and some stuff was broken, they smashed a window and came back next day and ordered coffee. We gave it to them. Okay, we said, fifty. You’ve got a deal, they said, but there’s a couple more things. No record player. We’ll bring you a jukebox with our records. Who’s we? Better you don’t ask, sweeties. And laundry, no crappy Chinese is doing your laundry, we are. We do the laundry for most of the restaurants in town, and we’ll discriminate against Jews from Eretz Yisroel? We said fine and continued as planned. We still hadn’t let the public in but had done a dry run with a few Israeli friends. The second night all the windows were smashed. The third night the espresso machine was ripped out, but it didn’t get broken. They came again and said they’d heard we’d had some trouble with the windows and the coffee machine and that they could fix everything, including sending the Chinese laundryman to hospital because when it all happened the poor guy had been hurt and he was lying injured in his laundry now and there was nobody to help him. We ran over. We helped him. He whispered, Don’t bring any more laundry and you don’t know me, eh? We said yes. We took him to the hospital. In an old phone book I had I found the number of my relative the policeman Braverman who had been promoted. I asked him over. I gave him some superior Colombian coffee we’d found in a store in Brooklyn. Man to man I told him what had happened and that we were going to file a complaint with the police and right away we thought of him. He looked at us in amazement, rubbed his hands, frowned, and said, No cops, you hear? Do you want to die for nothing instead of in some important war? We were surprised and he explained, Look, I can’t help you with this. But if you do this alone it won’t help either. You’ve got a license for an Italian coffee machine? We said we hadn’t but we did have a café license and he said, You can’t serve alcoholic beverages. We said we didn’t. He got up, looked around, and took a bottle of rye from behind the bar and said, And what’s this? We didn’t know what to say. He said, There are rules here, unwritten rules, these Jews are gentler than the Italians or the Irish who don’t have a Jewish soul, so you’d do well to listen to them, the others would have smashed up the whole place, you’d better learn to get along with them. After he’d gone the beat cop we’d seen from time to time in the neighborhood came in and asked to talk to us. He sat down. He had a cup of Colombian coffee too, said it was great, and said he understood we were new to the business so he was sorry he had to state the obvious. I’ll come in every week and in a brown bag left over from the coffee beans you buy and grind you’ll accidentally leave ten dollars. Next day my sergeant will come in and you’ll also forget ten dollars in a bag for him. And then, that evening, before the place fills up—if the place ever even opens, because look you’ve got two sinks instead of three and that’s against the law and you have no emergency exit which is even more against the law, and on the wall over there I see an obscene painting (I’d painted a dancer in the Canaanite style), and your entrance is only five feet wide instead of six and we found whiskey here when you don’t have a liquor license—well, that evening an officer will come along and he’ll also get a bag with ten dollars in it.

  We told him about the jukebox and the laundry. He said that they, those nice guys, were none of his business. Next day a few tables were smashed and a sink was broken and the Jews with the cigars came and wanted our autographs in Hebrew on their Yom Kippur prayer books and they brought in a huge jukebox. We argued for a long time. They called somebody and there were raised voices and we reached an agreement: We would pay for the jukebox. We would pay for the license for the jukebox. We would pay for the records we wouldn’t use. In exchange, we would be allowed to put our own records into the jukebox, and pay only a token sum for maintaining the original records and a not particularly high user’s fee. Then people came from City Hall to check out the sanitation and saw the two sinks and we were a citation by the sergeant who was sitting waiting for his money, and they got only twenty dollars for a permit to open our kitchen with only two sinks but then another twenty for the small chimney we’d run up outside to get rid of the smell of frying oil. And Braverman brought me a sticker from the “Shomer,” the Jewish policemen’s association, to stick on the windshield of the car I didn’t yet have, but surely would, and it’s free, he said. The tussle continued for about another week. The sweet Jews forgot that we hadn’t bought tables and towels from them. The windows were broken again and there happened to be a torrential rainstorm and so we paid more. We wanted two loudspeakers, which brought the City Hall inspectors in again, and which cost us another fifty dollars a week. And after all that we opened.

  We invited Pete Seeger from the Weavers who played and sang. Harry Belafonte sang. Hordes of Israelis hungry for hummus, tahini, and falafel came, they brought the Tel Aviv Falafel King who was visiting America and they waited to hear what he’d say and he pronounced it good. The place was packed. Americans came too, and everyone sang songs together; the atmosphere was great, the food tasty, we worked very hard and had two helpers, one was an Israeli who was down and out and so we let him wash dishes and it cost us ten broken plates an hour and the same number of cups and sadly we had to let him go but he came back as a customer and ate and didn’t pay and that was fine and he sat sadly in a corner and thought about the precision and beauty of Descartes. The place’s reputation spread. The policemen kept on coming. Our nice Jewish “friends” didn’t come any more but kept their distance and only sometimes, at two or three in the morning, after everybody had gone and only our beautiful waitresses were still hanging around, the cops came, and my relative, and then those kind Jewish souls as well, and we drank whiskey from a bottle we kept hidden so it didn’t get reported to anyone. When I asked the police officer why we were paying him when we were also supposed to be paying the people he was supposed to be protecting us from, he said there were all kinds of foreigners who thought they knew about America. They wrote in the papers. Among them were also numerous Americans who never got fined for anything and who only knew New York through taxi windows. Do you know how much a cop earns? How do you think America was made? The English came and killed the Indians and then they had a country. The Irish, Italians, and Jews came. Now the blacks and Puerto Ricans have come. And people are crying about what was done to the Indians. I tried to protest and tell him that it wasn’t just, but
he said I was an idealist and that it wouldn’t be to my benefit in later life. I told him that H. L. Mencken had said that an idealist was someone who believed that because roses smell better than cabbage you can make better soup out of them. My cousin asked if Mencken was Jewish and I said I didn’t think so. Carole helped us out quite a bit. She saw who was stealing and who was trying not to pay and she’d point them out surreptitiously and that way we were in control, because the work was hard. Preparing hundreds of portions of hummus. Two hundred portions of tahini. Lots of falafel and salads and warm pita bread and espresso and cappuccino and Turkish coffee, it was all hard and we sometimes slept as we worked.