Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue

by Mark Kurlansky

  "Aw, shit!" A topaz teardrop of olive oil had landed on the lapel of Joey's linen suit.

  "Don't worry about it," said Sal.

  "Give me a wet towel."

  "Don't touch." Sal produced a bottle of talcum powder and dusted the lapel. "Wait five minutes and just dust it off."

  "You sure?"

  Sal nodded.

  "Thank God I didn't wear my Armani."

  "You should be careful."

  "Sal, did you hear any gunshots or anything last night between ten and eleven?"

  "What, are you kidding? Just about every night. It's like Palermo here. But I didn't hear anything special."

  Joey, whose family was from Naples so he could ignore the slight against Palermo, wondered what Sal would consider special.

  "Sometimes I think it's just firecrackers. But I don't know. You can kill people with firecrackers, too, you know. It's gunpowder."

  "Yeah," said Joey. "Give me just a slice of that mozzarell'."

  "Sure, Joey." He cut a fat white piece. Joey tilted his head back and lowered it carefully into his mouth. "Yeah, it's good, Sal. But you ought to get some buffalo."

  "Yeah, I'll keep them in Tompkins Park. With the hippie dippies."

  "Yeah, take care. Ciao."

  "Ciao," said Sal A, and even Nathan across the street could see Sal A salute the backside of Officer Joey Parma with his middle finger. "Buffalo," Sal muttered with an expressively quick bend of his elbow.

  As Nathan and Sarah approached Tenth Street from the west side of the avenue and Joey Parma was coming up the other side, sweet-faced Ruben was waiting on the corner. He looked down Avenue A and then shouted across Tenth Street, "jBajando!" More than a dozen young men along the curbs of Tenth Street suddenly sat down casually on stoops and car fenders.

  But Joey turned east and Ruben waved everybody up.

  "Whaz up," Ruben said to Nathan with a smile. Nathan did not smile back. "Oh, the stock market's down?" It was some idea the local drug dealers had that if you did not deal drugs, you had investments on Wall Street instead. Those were the two games in New York in the 1980s, and everybody, they reasoned, must be playing one or the other—and some people were playing both.

  It was important to Nathan that Ruben smiled and made an effort, because that was showing respect. That was all you needed to get along in the neighborhood.

  Walking down this block of Tenth Street—in four-four or cha-cha-cha—a dozen times dealers whispered the word "Smoke?" There might be other reasons for walking down the block, but anyone on Tenth Street who was not a cop was worth a try.

  The dealers had been there since the neighborhood became famous in the 1960s. People from all over the city came down by subway, in expensive polished cars that were always parked in garages, and in long white limousines, to do business with the merchants who stood on the street stupidly repeating one word—"Smoke?"

  Many of the people on the block were cops—federal agents, city police, special task forces. They hid out in unmarked delivery trucks or delivery trucks with uninspired logos—a printed name such as BOB'S BREAD with no picture or slogan.

  Somehow Nathan had gotten to the age of fourteen without ever trying drugs. This was not a principled position. He had wanted to try them, but he was afraid of the lean, vicious-looking men who sold them. It was exactly like the way he had longed to have the corrupt worldly experience of one of those plump, oddly dressed women on Eleventh Street. But he was afraid of the men who sold them, too. And at any moment he might run into his father, who did not seem to completely approve of him and was forever wandering the streets, singing Irving Berlin songs. As a child, Nathan thought Harry was checking up on him. Only as an adult did he understand that this local wandering was simply what Harry did. Harry had come to New York not so much to seek his fortune; he came to be lucky He was the lucky New York son of a luckless European family, and he wandered the streets of his neighborhood singing, not checking up on anyone but just waiting for luck to meet him in the street.

  Mordy a year younger than Nathan, was not afraid of running into his father, getting caught, being wrong, or anything else. It was not that he was particularly courageous. He simply lacked the valuable sense of danger. He tried a woman on Eleventh Street when Nathan had still not tried anyone. Of course, Mordy, in what was to become a pattern for life, had no money to pay her. At the time Nathan did not appreciate this accomplishment, because he did not know that you always had to pay first. But Mordy, at fourteen, had talked a prostitute into a gift, a moment of whimsy or perhaps a yearning for innocence that earned her a beating that chipped a tooth. And then Nathan, full of envy and resentment, had to get the money and pay it to a fat man with a broken nose—you could almost make out the outline of someone's knuckle in the dent in his nose—so that he would spare Mordy.

  Nathan's urge for those women passed without his ever having sampled. He did soon taste the smoke at a party on Rivington Street where they played Motown music—"Sugar Pie, Honeybun," over and over again. The other thing Nathan remembered about that party was that it was the first time he ever heard the term "East Village." Nathan had grown up in a neighborhood called "the Lower East Side." His mother, Ruth, had grown up there when it was just the East Side. Manhattan was getting more and more labels. At this party, as time stood still from his first inhalation of marijuana, he heard someone say, "You know, they are going to start calling this neighborhood 'the East Village.' " The term took hold as predicted, except that it never did include Rivington Street.

  For some years after that, Nathan bought his smoke on this block of Tenth Street. A fast $5 bill for a "nickel bag." Mordy was still buying nickel bags. A nickel bag wasn't as big as it used to be. But it didn't need to be. The bags got smaller and smaller, but the smoke got stronger and stronger, and after so many years of smoking, it seemed to take Mordy only an occasional puff or two to maintain himself in a distant and timeless state.

  In the 1960s, Nathan, Mordy, and everyone they knew bought smoke on the block. People liked marijuana because time stumbles by goofily—a minute, an hour, an evening—and they all stood on the street letting time escape them. Nathan started wondering what was happening to that time. In fact, he was worrying more and more about time. So he stopped. And now he didn't smile at the pushers. Everyone agreed that if you didn't smoke in the sixties something was wrong with you, but if you still did in the eighties you were just as wrong. The window for drug correctness was small and narrow.

  The street pushers also changed. The Puerto Ricans from the other side of First Avenue moved in. Now Dominicans were starting to push out the Puerto Ricans. The Dominicans, not welcomed by the Puerto Ricans, had built their own neighborhood, turning dying Rivington Street into a boulevard of restaurants and grocery stores. The Puerto Ricans complained that these stores kept the entire neighborhood up all night with loud merengue music and that they were all selling crack down there, the new drug that seemed to make people crazy. Some Dominicans may have been selling crack, but there were also a lot selling bananas, cane juice, and coconut ices. The logic-defying Puerto Rican response was that Dominicans wore no socks. Dominicans, they insisted, were uncivilized because they ate bananas and wore no socks.

  Crack was showing up near the East River where the Puerto Ricans lived in tall building projects and also in the old tenements where the Jews had left mezuzahs behind. All over the neighborhood, tiny vials with bright plastic covers turned up wedged in the pavement cracks the way until a few years before, syringes and needles used to be found. Neighborhood people, and the police as well, preferred heroin addicts dozing off in St. Mark's or Tompkins Square to wild-eyed, crazed crack-heads. If the drug pushers had kept anesthetizing everyone with marijuana and heroin, their trade might have lasted in the neighborhood indefinitely. But crack was causing trouble. Where these tiny colored caps were found, there were crazy people, robberies, muggings, break-ins.

  On Tenth Street they sold only smoke. If they had sold crack on Tenth Str
eet, Nathan would have had to move his shop, and he did not want to move because his parents owned the building, and the only way a photocopy shop could keep open charging as little as he did, which was all his clientele could afford, was to have a rent-free office space.

  Young, well-dressed uptowners came down to buy smoke on Tenth Street in the same well-waxed, expensive cars as were used by the aging Jews who drove in from Long Island and New Jersey to shop in the delis and fish shops. The smoke crowd drove down on Friday night, the smoked fish crowd drove in on Sunday The neighborhood was a respectable drug-trafficking area, although it's true, the pushers did not always look too good. There was one huge man with a big mop of black hair and furious eyes who would hobble down the street looking as if his head were about to explode and he was struggling to keep it on.

  And none of this bothered Nathan. It was his neighborhood, and he liked the way the street was lined with people who made a distinction between him and outsiders. Nobody said, "Smoke?" to him, because he belonged. Sometimes a new pusher would be working the evening and he would say to Nathan, "Smoke?" because he didn't know. One of the regulars would lightly punch the new man in the biceps and say, "Qué hace, maricón? He don't fucking want you."

  The pushers made Nathan feel safe. No one was going to do anything to him, his family, or his photocopy shop as long as the pushers were out there. Nobody came onto this block to rob or bother children or steal cars. And the pushers tried hard to keep people like Nathan appreciative of them. They seemed to know that at any time, the people of the neighborhood could rise up and push them out.

  Nathan knew how to be just cold enough so that they knew to respect him, but not so cold that they would single him out if things went wrong some night. Because he knew, though you never saw it, that they had guns. At least the lookouts did. The ones nonchalantly passing their evenings on the corners. Ruben probably had a gun.

  Recently, Nathan's attitude had begun to shift. The change had started with Sarah's birth. He could not forget those hours of holding Sonia's hands while she writhed in pain that he could not even imagine, struggling through what was termed "an easy labor." The pushing, the struggling, the tearing. Sarah came out in a gracefully arced little swan dive into the doctor's hands. It was the only graceful motion in the entire ordeal. He held her, looked into her curious eyes. She was already preparing questions.

  As he turned to look at Sonia, his eyes had swept through the room like the panning camera of a documentary filmmaker, and he was astounded by the sight. The room looked like the scene of a massacre. Blood was splattered on the walls, clotted on sheets, puddled on the floor, under the table. Why was it like this? What had nature intended? This, then, was life, a violent and dangerous struggle.

  And that had made him start looking differently at the streets of his home. They were full of garbage and disease and drug dealers with loaded guns. Probably one of them had shot Eli Rabbinowitz, a nice man who never hurt anyone, thought Nathan, who had never tried to give him a massage. Nathan was having these thoughts now as he walked down his street, hoping Sarah was not hearing the discussions of Eli Rabbinowitz's remains. One dealer insisted that "the fucking cops spent all fucking mañana fitting pieces together so they could put together his face to see who the fucking pen-dejo was." Fortunately, the one who insisted that the body was headless and that the police were still searching the neighborhood for the missing part was imparting this news in Spanish.

  Should he be like the new smarts? Nathan wondered. Like Maya's parents? Did he need to start earning money for types of schools he had never heard of? What did he have to do to make life safe for her?

  When Sarah was riding on his shoulders, he felt an unreasonable hostility stir at the sight of the pushers. He didn't want Ruben's sweet-faced, friendly nod when Sarah was up on his shoulders, waving and laughing at the funny world. But there it was. Sarah looked down from Nathan's shoulders at the sweet-faced man and drew his portrait in her notebook, which she balanced on her father's head—two zigzags across the page.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Talmudic Shortcomings

  NATHAN WOKE UP on a Friday morning with the unshakable sense that during this day he would commit a catastrophic error in judgment. Something had been written by the gods, and as he walked to the Meshugaloo Copy Center, Nathan Seltzer knew this was one Friday that he would regret.

  He pulled open the gate of his store, rolling up a dozen indecipherable spray-painted names. "Seltzer!" shouted out Carmela, a name that means "Candy" Carmela was already living above the shop when he first opened it, one of his father's old tenants who paid a few dollars rent. She spent the entire summer sitting half out her window on the fire escape. There used to be many more on the other fire escapes, and they all shouted to one another. But in recent summers almost everyone had bought air conditioners, which hummed and dripped, and they had all gone inside and closed their windows, leaving Carmela with no one to shout at but Nathan and his customers. She planted her spacious denim-covered posterior—a nice posterior, though a bit overstated for white people, as she herself once observed—on the window ledge and twisted to see the street traffic below. "What's the probkma? Slow down. Quiere me to take you to Cristofina to read tu fortuna?"

  Nathan had never seen a reason to believe that Cristofina could read fortunes. But Carmela, on the other hand, had uncanny abilities.

  People often sense that they are about to encounter fate, but usually once they do, they don't recognize it. That is why they go to fortune-tellers. At first Nathan thought his fateful moment would be the meeting. It was a slow summer Friday, and as Nathan decided to close his shop a few minutes early to get to his meeting, turning off a Beethoven quartet before its urgency had quite mounted and putting out water and dried food for the always hungry Pepe Le Moko—wasn't he finding enough mice to eat?—he had a sense of some misfortune beshirt—fated. It was even possible that the entire reason for this doomed feeling he had awakened with was that he knew he had this meeting. He had been contacted by a growing chain of photocopy stores called Copy Katz. Nathan thought it was a clever name. The man's name was Ira Katz.

  Nathan took a subway, the F train from Houston, to their offices west of Fifth Avenue in the Fifties. Immediately he could see that Ira was not the owner of Copy Katz in the way that he, Nathan, was the owner of Meshugaloo Copy Center. It was more complicated for this fast-growing company that already had fifteen copy stores in Manhattan alone.

  Their office was in a building so perfectly air-conditioned that it was climateless, odorless, temperatureless—an experiment in total sensory deprivation. Nathan tried to remember from his childhood if this was one of the tests given to qualify as an astronaut. Could you withstand several hours in a climateless environment? The chairs were all very large, which may have been intended to make the people in them feel very small, the same way Sarah sat in chairs dreaming of the day when her legs could reach the floor.

  "What is Meshugaloo Copy?" Ira Katz wanted to know, probably noting that his name wasn't Nathan Meshugaloo.

  "It comes from a song. From the sixties?"

  He could see that they were worried about the mere mention of the sixties. Their offer had been simple—or at least that was how they'd put it. Five hundred thousand dollars for his business on Tenth Street.

  "Why do you want it?"

  "We like the location."

  "Tenth Street?" Katz could be a drug dealer. You could never tell.

  "We believe in the future of the neighborhood."

  Five hundred thousand dollars. Nathan was not good with large numbers, but it seemed that this was a lot of money But there was a problem with the Copy Katz offer. They required that he sign an agreement not to open another copy store in the neighborhood.

  He did not have to be in this business. He had gotten into it by chance. In college he had studied music history without ever asking how he would earn a living from that. He wasn't even a musician, as his father always pointed out: "He studies mu
sic, but he doesn't play."

  So much seemed fated. There was a cosmic string that started with Nathan's fascination with the life of Beethoven and carried for more than twenty years to his big mistake. Would the one have happened without the other? Growing up, Nathan had never heard anything good about anything German except apple strudel, which was said to be Jewish. German was the pariah culture and the ugly language. But then there was the music. What did the words of Schiller mean in the last movement of the Ninth? And for that matter, what wondrously beautiful things were Adam and Eve saying in Haydn's "The Creation"? Nathan wanted to read letters and criticism by Beethoven's contemporaries. Soon he was learning the ugly language to understand beautiful music, learning it with surprising ease, since the German language, like apple strudel, tasted a bit like something Jewish. Not only was it not that ugly, but it bore a surprising similarity to Yiddish, which he had been listening to, though not really understanding, all his life.

  As he left the meeting on this Friday, Nathan could not yet see how the German language would direct his destiny, but it was probably the beginning, the first opening without which the mistake probably couldn't have happened two decades later. Life moves in tiny increments, with hidden causes and effects. Beethoven's symphonies had taught him that no note or phrase is without later consequence. The gentle role of an oboe leads to a bellyful of strings, which opens the way for the rampage of a full orchestra. And the oboe had started so quietly. Nothing in life happens suddenly. There were always hidden events that created an opening, started a pathway, like invisible advance men who cannot be controlled because their work is never seen.

  Nathan's only instrument was a harmonica, which Harry insisted was not a real instrument. What was worse, he played a classical harmonica. He could play Beethoven violin sonatas on the harmonica. Harry, who not only didn't like harmonicas but disdained classical music, shook his head in despair. His other son, Mordy, also had musical interest, but, even less comprehensible to Harry than a classical harmonica, Mordy composed music on a computer that was played without any musical instruments at all. In fact, since Mordy did not have the equipment, his music was never played. But certainly to Harry it would not have been music.