Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue

by Mark Kurlansky

  Most of the landlords in the neighborhood were trying to turn over apartments quickly. The apartments were rent stabilized, and only by changing hands frequently could the rents be brought up to the extravagant prices new tenants were ready to pay. The traditional alternative had been to set the building on fire. Fires usually broke out in buildings that were occupied by squatters. A fairly minor fire could get the building condemned and the squatters removed. Some buildings with paying tenants had rents so low that fire insurance was still the landlord's most lucrative choice. With people now willing to pay undreamed-of rents to live in the East Village, only the Seltzers were ever sorry to see a tenant leave.

  So the cleaners and painters in the neighborhood had learned to work fast. And now the new tenant was moving in, a girl from Virginia with short, reddish blond hair and brown leather luggage. She had just graduated from somewhere and was very excited about her first job in New York. Nathan confessed to himself that most people he knew had yet to land their first job in New York.

  "Hello, I'm Catherine."

  "Hello, Catherine."

  "Can I ask you a question? What's this?" She was pointing at a mezuzah on the doorpost, a simple tube buried in so many layers of paint that the Hebrew letter shin, the first letter of the prayer on the tiny scroll inside, a letter that looked like a w, was looking more like a u. It had been there even before Birdie Nagel. All the doorways in the building had them.

  "It's a mezuzah. It's a Jewish ornament."

  "What does it mean?" Catherine asked, wrinkling her nose.

  "It means ... It is a sign. It means that a Jewish family lives there."

  "Oh! You mean it gives good luck!"

  "Sometimes."

  Arnie had run out of luck. With shops and restaurants opening all around him, the owner of the storefront by Arnie's new sidewalk spot realized that before he could rent the space, he had to get the homeless person off the sidewalk in front. The owner tried to talk to him but discovered him so sick that he could barely speak. He called the police and Arnie was taken away. Arnie regained consciousness only once. He found himself in a bed. A bed. He had decided some time before that he was to die on the street, and now for some reason he was in a bed. He never found out why.

  People in the neighborhood went to his spot and lit candles and stood, some sat, and told stories remembering Arnie. Xabe, the former neighborhood graffiti felon and current mural artist, did a mural on the wall, the first nonpaid work he had done in years—a fuzzy likeness of Arnie in his beret with wings and his right hand clenched. In large orange letters across the top, as though written in a cloud, it said, "Viva la huelga, Arnie!"

  Someone taped a sign to the wall saying: "On this spot died Arnie Johnson, killed by the landlords of New York." No one had known Arnie's last name, and it was one of those landlords of New York, the one who had evicted him in the first place, who furnished the name. Nathan was surprised. Johnson. Everyone had always thought of Arnie as Jewish.

  "También," said Panista, tapping out an idea on a lamppost. "I guess it was just that he read a lot."

  In the evening, neighborhood friends sat vigil on the spot, and Nathan, who had joined them, found his brother already positioned on the concrete.

  "Mordy!"

  Mordy patted the sidewalk next to him as though fluffing a pillow for his brother. "Have a seat, bro'."

  Nathan sat on the sidewalk next to him. "Where's Priscilla?"

  Mordy, in his best John Kennedy impression, said, "Ah, let me say this about that. Ah. I left her on Hyannis."

  "What happened?"

  "The ducks. I couldn't take the ducks. They had ducks everywhere. These painted wooden ducks like deities for some ceremony. And they had pictures of ducks on the walls. There were ducks painted on their mailbox. They wore duck ties. They had duck belt buckles. Now, here's the weird part. They hate ducks. They want to kill them all. They are spending all summer caressing this arsenal of weapons just so they can go out in the fall and kill every duck in Massachusetts. Even their dogs want to kill ducks. So one day I said to the father, 'What's with the ducks?' Just like that. 'What's with the ducks? If you hate them so much you want to kill them, why do you put their pictures up all over the place?' "

  "And?"

  "And they asked me to leave. I may be skipping some steps, but that's basically it. Priscilla said I thought I was better than them. I think that may be an anti-Semitic observation. We should ask Dad."

  For more than a week, people sat vigil, remembering Arnie. The owner of the coming Mexican restaurant, a man from New Jersey who was not at all Mexican and did not know what Viva la huelga meant, was glad that the writing was in Spanish, because he feared being blamed for Arnie's death and he understood that in order to be accepted in the neighborhood, he was going to have to keep this mural as part of the design of the exterior of his Mexican restaurant. He felt that the Spanish message made it seem more authentic and was pleased to learn that it was actually a Mexican slogan or Mexican American or somehow Mexican. In fact, he decided, in a fit of public relations genius, to name the restaurant Viva la Huelga!

  Palo, Panista, and some of the other Puerto Ricans thought this might be their chance for a job. The Japanese were certainly showing no interest. And this was a gringo. They started speaking Spanish in a slow, nasal singsong in the hopes of passing for Mexicans. But the gringo brought in his own Mexicans from his other restaurant on the Upper East Side. The joke to the Puerto Ricans was that his Mexicans weren't Mexican, either, but an assortment of Salvadorans and Guatemalans.

  Nathan found the seersucker fardarter sitting on a curb in front of Arnie's memorial, clutching himself, his body heaving great sobs. Nathan was moved by the idea that even this fardarter smart mourned Arnie. He put his hand on the smart's seersucker shoulder, somehow conveying kinship.

  "Oh God!" moaned the fardarter.

  "Look," said Nathan, sitting next to him on the curb. "Look, Arnie was an original."

  "Who? Oh God. Arnie? Is that the owner? I'm going to sue the son of a bitch." The face of the fardarter was the color of the blue stripes of his seersucker. He doubled over on the curb, the drainage gutter, an unsavory place littered with little green caps from crack vials, a used condom, and a dead pigeon that had probably died because Birdie Nagel wasn't here with her birdseed.

  "Fucking sushi," groaned the fardarter.

  "You've been eating sushi?"

  The fardarter nodded in the affirmative.

  "On Fourth Street?" Nathan got up, not waiting for his answer. "Jose."

  "What?" groaned the fardarter.

  "That's his name, Jose Fishman."

  But where was Arnie? What had happened to his body? Neighborhood people wanted to know, because a disturbing rumor was in circulation. Nathan first heard it from Panista. "The city has all these homeless bodies. They just treat them as trash. Put them on the barges."

  "What barges?"

  "The trash barges for Staten Island. Arnie and a lot of other guys from the neighborhood are now landfill in Staten Island."

  "Think about it," Mordy said. "Names are never meaningless. They are signals. Clues. Remember Bob's Greasy Hand? Someone was greasing it. You know what they call the place where the trash barges go in Staten Island? Fresh Kills. Arnie is going to Fresh Kills."

  Nathan decided he would go to Bellevue Hospital and find out. Not only would he go, but he would ignore the First Avenue bus and go out of his way to take the Lexington Avenue subway, which arrived with a normal supply of oxygen. At the hospital he was sent to several different offices.

  "What happens to the body of a homeless person if there is no name or friends or relatives?"

  "Have you lost a relative?" a thin black woman demanded to know from an office so air-conditioned that she was clutching a green wool sweater.

  "No. I am trying to find out about a friend. A homeless friend."

  "Why didn't you give him a home?"

  "He had a home. That's not the point." />
  "Homeless people do not necessarily come here. It is a myth. They are taken to the nearest hospital."

  "And then what happens?"

  "They are sent to the city morgue."

  "And then?"

  "I really don't know. Cremated, I suppose."

  "Even if they are Jewish?"

  "I don't know. If they are unknown, how would we know their religion?"

  On the way back to the neighborhood, Nathan felt nothing in particular when the train slowed down in the dark tunnel just before Fourteenth Street. Even after the train stopped, he felt nothing more than the slight twinge of memory that may flicker across a scar. And when the train started filling up with smoke, he was one of the few to remain calm. In fact, he found that he helped the others deal with their panic. "You have to breathe," he said. They did, though they then coughed from the smoke.

  The train doors opened and transit police with large flashlights led them through the tunnel. "You're okay as long as you don't touch the third rail," said Nathan, recalling his childhood, to the woman walking with him as she buried her well-manicured nails into his arm. Tiny mice scurried out of their way as they walked toward the Union Square station.

  There were mud holes, patches of water, that he could not detect until he stepped into them. He tried to walk in front of the woman who was clutching his arm, but it was difficult because she kept pulling him toward her. As a transit cop's flashlight shot a beam at their feet, Nathan could see that she was wearing open-toed, light summer shoes. They could hear but not see the scurrying of large, pink-toed black rats ahead of them. For a second he imagined that tough black rats might be waiting for him in the tunnel because they had heard of his record on killing mice. Was there rodent solidarity?

  Everything cast huge shadows and looked larger in the beams of the flashlights. Nathan could clearly see one rat that was as big as his foot, a lumbering, black-furred animal with a bleeding sore on its back. Nathan stood ready to kick it away, but the rat knew to avoid him. As he trudged in the mushy, spongy, sometimes gravelly, and at other times slippery soil or muck that filled the floors of subway tunnels, the air seemed too hot and too still to breathe. The tunnel, dark and moist, looked as if it should have been cool. Nathan thought he had never been so hot in a dark, moist place. But he did not want to feel a sudden breeze, because the only thing that caused such breezes were oncoming trains. Well, they had radios. They had probably arranged for all oncoming trains to stop. Nathan felt in complete control of himself.

  When they arrived at the Union Square station, he was not even sweating. The woman, still attached to his arm like a bat to a cave ceiling, was. She was younger than he had realized. Her black, wet hair clung to her shining forehead. The blurry smudges of makeup made her eyes look deep-set and wide, like those of a frightened nocturnal animal. Nathan, on the other hand, tall, dry, and calm, understood exactly how she felt. He sat her down on a bench and removed the talons from his arm. She was trying to express her gratitude in between epithets—"I cannot believe this shit. Can you believe this happened? Thank you so much. Fucking assholes. I'm suing. I couldn't have made it without you. Fucking sons of bitches."

  But Nathan knew that she could breathe again now and the sweat was drying and she would be all right. He would never get a chance to explain what helping her had done for him. He felt like singing as he climbed the stairs out of the station, rubbing his arms where a small amount of blood had pooled in the woman's fingernail marks. He was in control—unshakably in control. He was indestructible. A wound had healed without leaving a weakened spot. Cristofina's pigeons were well worth the $1,000—worth the sacrifice.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Calamity in Running Shoes

  IT WAS THE SADDEST DAY of the year, the ninth day of Av, Tisha-b'Av. This was the day of Jewish calamity, the day of the destruction of David's Temple in Jerusalem in 586 B.C. Rebuilt, it was again destroyed by the Romans on the same day in A.D. 70, never to be rebuilt until the Messiah comes. It is also considered the date of the expulsion of Jews from Spain and the date of the beginning of the Holocaust. It is a bad day for Jews.

  Nathan had been up most of the night before. Sonia had complained of nausea, she vomited, she still felt nauseated. At almost three in the morning, with only a distant siren and a few muffled voices outside, Nathan, who had been trying to comfort her, was overcome with happiness. Sonia saw the silly Raggedy Ann smile on Nathan's face and realized what he was thinking. Of course! He was right, and to her surprise she also felt very happy, though still very nauseated. She reassured him that she wanted it. Her play was in production, and now she really did want the child, though she thought she had been careful and didn't know how it had happened.

  "But you're happy, right?" asked Nathan with his arms around her.

  "Yes," she moaned as happily as someone can sound when they feel like vomiting.

  It was hard to feel optimistic in the scalding August heat of Tisha-b'Av. There were some who said the Messiah would come on a Tisha-b'Av and the temple would be rebuilt on that date. But it didn't seem that the Messiah was coming this year, and most people in the neighborhood were reading signs for more short-term developments. For example, Dukakis, still in the lead, was on the defensive and had to release medical records to quiet the rumor that he was mentally unstable. While not articulating any ideas for the presidency, Bush had managed to shave away his sizable deficits in the polls by politely pointing out the risks of having a short, dark person in the White House. Such a bushy-eyebrowed dark person would be soft on crime and friendly to "criminal elements" sometimes known as black people. Hot Mediterranean blood would account for mental instability. And he could not be trusted with defense, a suspicion bolstered by the fact that he tried to ride in a tank and looked too short. It would have been hard for people in the neighborhood to have believed that Americans were weighing such things seriously, if experience had not already often demonstrated that people out in America thought about completely different things than did people in the East Village.

  But on this ninth day of Av in the year 5749, Nusan, the cautious pessimist, saw reasons for optimism. The Mets were out of their slump. Darryl Strawberry's two-run homer had beaten the Pirates 2—1. In fact, the Pirates had been so destroyed in their series with the Mets that they had now slipped to third place behind Montreal. The Mets were comfortably in first place, and even Nusan allowed himself to imagine the unimaginable, the Mets back in a World Series.

  José Fishman, who of course didn't know it was Tisha-b'Av, was setting off as usual with his shopping cart in the first summer light of morning, while Nathan and Sonia were still in nauseous joyous embrace, to get cash from the bank machine to go down to Fulton Street, to fight with the few remaining customers, mostly Chinese, over the few remaining fish from the night's market. It seemed no one in the neighborhood, and especially the smarts, could resist sushi at bargain prices. There had been some complaints of tainted fish, and he thought some might even have been true. By the time he got the leftover, sweaty fish back to his shop, they were a withered and rank catch. But what did they want for these prices?

  He was beginning to get the feeling that someone was following him. At first he thought it had begun when he got the cash. But to his relief, when he looked in a window reflection, he could see that it was only one of those fucking Dominicano drug dealers. A real stereotype, he wore no socks and looked like he was just off a farm. It irritated him that after all his years in the neighborhood, they were still coming up to him and saying, "Smoke?" as though he were some stupid white guy down in the neighborhood for a weekend thrill. "¿Qué quieres, man? Why you follow me, you fucking plátano eater? I'm smoking nothing. Nada!" He spat.

  The words were so angry that the man, more than twice his size, put up his arms defensively, like a boxer cornered against the ropes. The large Dominican was confused by this unexpected aggression and might have run away except that Jose kept jabbing his shins with the shopping cart, which
hurt and angered him. The Dominican released a primordial roar as he grabbed the cart and flung it into the street, which did not yet have traffic. Now he became afraid that he had caused too much attention and, beginning to panic, he grabbed Jose by the collar and pulled him toward him.

  "Fucking Pandejo," José snapped and then seeing the gun at his chest, hissed his final curse, "iHijueputa!"

  The Dominican fired his handgun three times into José Fishman's chest, the barrel held so tightly into his body that the shots made little noise. Jose's body began heaving and pumping great quantities of blackish blood so that it spilled onto the other man's T-shirt and blue jeans. The killer reached into the muck that had been Jose and managed to find the folded wad of $20 bills. Then, tearing off his own dark stained T-shirt, he ran east toward the river.

  Tisha-b'Av had begun reasonably well for Nusan. Chaim Litvak had returned from Israel the day before with the news that Yankel Fink's knishes sank. The kasha went down in forty seconds, the potato in fifty-two seconds, and since Nusan's bet of one minute was the closest, he won the pot of $110. Kirchbaum, who had reluctantly taken kasha in two minutes, grudgingly pointed out that he had wanted cheese in forty seconds but they had refused to take cheese, saying it would go bad while traveling. "Go bad," Kirchbaum had countered. "There's no cheese. It's all potato, just like the kasha. They're all potato." But no one was going to listen to a sixty-five-year-old, barely retirement age.

  Nusan spent his winnings on running shoes at the new store behind Arnie's former sidewalk home. On Tisha-b'Av, as on all days of fast and mourning, Jews are not supposed to wear leather. This was particularly directed toward shoes, it is always said, because leather shoes offer great comfort. It could be argued that the young men on Eighth Street wearing leather pants in the height of August were not especially comfortable. And the assumption that leather made the most comfortable shoe predated the development of running shoes. Nevertheless, on Tisha-bAv, or Yom Kippur, or in mourning, comfortable and expensive nylon running shoes were becoming the shoes of penitence.