New York City Noir

by Tim McLoughlin

  There was a dream of something and maybe it wasn’t even a guy like her old man or the one in the Arrow Shirt ad or the doctor she met at the diner, the one with the big apartment in the new high-rises, the view from the bedroom so great that she’d have to see it to believe it, he’d said. Maybe it wasn’t a man dream at all. But it was something. It was something and it was there and then it was gone.

  ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE

  BY MARY BYRNE

  Astoria

  It wasn’t the boys from Carrickmacross

  Or the boys from Ballybay

  But the dealin’ men from Crossmaglen

  Put whiskey in me tae

  My father announced this from a comfortable armchair by a window. Clad in good pajamas, he had “showered, shat, and shaved,” as he put it himself. In fact, this had been engineered and executed by an obese but energetic Polish lady of some thirty-eight years who was now about to leave after the graveyard shift. An old phonograph exuded Johnny Mathis or Andy Williams, I don’t know which. Or care. Schmaltzy music kept my dad quiet. It was almost as important as the nurses.

  The Pole bustled back into the room, sweating already, and hung about with bags and baskets.

  “A proper scavenger,” said Dad.

  “You can talk,” the Pole shot back.

  “Live where you’d die. Build a nest in your ear.” He eyed me crossly. We exchanged stares.

  “I weel not take much more of thees,” said the Pole. “He’s gotta be put in a home. Those opiates are bedd for his hedd. Hallucinations again last night, squirrels climbing the bedroom vall and someone up a ladder—”

  “She’s cleaning the house out little by little,” said my dad, “hence the multifarious bags.”

  “—not to mention the insults and the smell of his excreta,” she went on.

  I stood up, hoping she’d get the hint. I had no desire to discuss Dad’s excreta—or anyone else’s—with a sweaty and exhausted Pole.

  “Get someone to relieve me a few nights,” she ordered, heading for the door. “I gotta lotta werk on.”

  She was mixed up in illegal sweatshops, and perhaps even illegal aliens. A true wart on the heel of humanity, she even had her own off-off-illegal sweatshop, in which the most desperate of Eastern Europeans put together for her benefit little trinkets and zippered bags made from the offcuts of the real thing.

  “When you kill a pig, nothing goes to loss but the squeal,” Dad pronounced as she flounced out the door.

  We were alone. My son Sean hadn’t come home last night, an increasingly frequent occurrence. The big house was silent but for the ticking of old clocks, Dad’s only hobby and luxury. Every room had several of them. “Are them things gonna be bongin’ all night?” my wife had said the first night we slept there after the honeymoon.

  * * *

  Naïma, the day-shift nurse, was late. Normally my wife dealt with any kind of overlap problem before going off to her museum job. But she was absent at the moment, as she was more and more these days.

  “Where’s the Swamp Rat?” asked Dad, as if reading my thoughts.

  Nulty Jr. eyed Nulty Sr. I wondered just how senile the old man really was.

  “Some art shindig in St. Petersburg,” I replied. I wondered why I bothered.

  “Home to the swamps,” said Dad.

  “No, the other St. Petersburg, the Russian one.”

  That seemed to silence him, or else his thoughts wandered off to something else. He dubbed my wife the Swamp Rat as soon as he heard she came from Tampa, Florida. At the time, I was offended for her. I was in love with this dark little hustler—she reminded me of Edith Piaf. I called her La Piaf. Then. But little by little the very things that pleased me at first made me hate her later: her bustling ass, the way she crimped her thin frizzy hair, a moue thing she did with her mouth as if to strengthen up facial muscles. I soon saw her thrifty housekeeping as meanness. She was prepared to spend money on no one but herself. She even squeezed enough for little facelifts and gold wire here and there over the years. This was on top of sports clubs, gyms, dance classes, and trainers. The house was feng shui–compliant, another recent source of trouble and expense.

  By now, I approved the nickname. She’d been in it for the money from the start, and I had been reeled in, hook, line, and sinker. I suspect the facelifts and staying in shape were preparation for getting away from me in the best possible circumstances. Women always went away—my mother took off without a by-your-leave.

  I left the old man alone for a minute and went down to collect the mail. Although I received my business mail in the bar we owned on Broadway, The Two Way Inn (because there are two ways in), the family’s private mail arrived here. Sometimes Naïma or Old Jessica left personal mail lying around for days. I disapproved of such a risk. Dad trained me to structure my day around things like that: “Get the unpleasant stuff out of the way first. Leave nothing lying to fester.”

  There was a postcard from the Swamp Rat singing the praises of St. Petersburg. I knew she was there with the big Armenian, her latest conquest, but I could prove nothing and was waiting for something to come to a head. There was junk mail for my son Sean and more for my daughter Maureen, who had just moved out for the second time with a second man. Rectitude hadn’t made it to the third generation.

  At the bottom there was a letter with a Canadian postmark from a lawyer’s office in Québec. My heart gave a lurch. Suddenly Naïma was behind me. I smelled her perfume before I turned to face her. She was flushed.

  “Musing again?” She had a light, assured voice. I envied her calm contentment. In another life I would have loved her and this would have done me good.

  I looked at the letter then looked at her.

  “Come on, I’ll make you a decent coffee before you go.” She took my elbow.

  * * *

  I walked to the bar each morning as Dad once did. This always cleared my head. There was no spring in New York this year. There never is. I left the house huddling against a cold wind blowing off the river, but by the time I reached Mt. Carmel Cemetery, the summer had arrived. Here it was, late, when we’d almost given up hope.

  I paused for a moment to look at the broken, half-buried headstones of Irish-born immigrants from famine times, people who’d worked in the factories, greenhouses, and homes of the nearby rich. Every dog has his day, I could hear Dad say, although I knew the old man always felt a bit of a fraud in the mansion on 12th Street. It was the house which had so impressed La Piaf at first. I heard my father again: Not a house for a humble tiller of the soil. Somehow it was bearable because it wasn’t ours. It belonged to Dad’s brother, Uncle Eddie, Canadian millionaire. The Two Way Inn belonged to him as well. No one knew exactly how Eddie Nulty had made his money. Fact is, he was the eldest of ten, had come out around the time of the Irish Civil War, worked in bars at first, then got on the ladder and sent for his little brother.

  The further I walked, the more my step steadied and took on a rhythm independent of my thoughts. I could hear the reassuring rattle of the El.

  “And that’s when the difference between the two brothers showed,” my mother told me, way back. “Eddie went to get your father off the boat. He was crumpled, dirty, and sick after all that time at sea. But Eddie pounced! On what? Your dad’s boots. They weren’t polished, and were laced with binder twine.”

  “So Eddie was pissed?”

  “Watch your language. Eddie was mixed up in something,” said Mom. “I heard talk of guns. Your father told me a story about when he was a boy, going to the market with their father in the early morning. They came across Eddie doing lookout on the road. ‘What’s up?’ your grandfather asked. ‘Court martial,’ Eddie said. ‘They’re in the field, decidin’ whether they’ll kill himself or not.’ ‘Have nothing to do with all this,’ the father told the young boy.”

  She was convinced Eddie was still mixed up in something. Nobody could get that rich by legal means. Yet occasionally, when Dad was on a bender, he got so out
of hand that Mom called Eddie, regretting it afterwards. Somehow Eddie knew how to whip Dad into line. And things would continue for another while. When it was over, Mom banged on about conversations she’d heard, money she’d seen handed over in cabs, and about a bar being the best place to launder money. “What do you know about laundering?” I often replied. “You got Jessica to do it for you!”

  I regretted such remarks now, and wondered where she was.

  * * *

  In no time at all I reached Broadway, with its crowds and traffic and fruit displays. I liked it better here. This was home. Men on the sidewalk spoke Chinese and Slav and Arabic into cell phones. Visit Queens and see the world. Here was where the Nultys started out, in a small apartment over a busy junction. Young parents, two small children, plenty of stress, and plenty of fun. Dad drove a bus and binge-drank. One day he parked the bus full of passengers and went into The Beer Garten (there was no garten) and got drunk. There was hell at home and Eddie was sent for.

  It was an icy winter’s day when Eddie came up the steep narrow stairs wearing a black coat with some kind of fur collar, like a rich man in the movies. Mom wrung her hands. Dad was strangely obeisant as if to his own father, and it was all settled. The German wanted to sell up The Beer Garten. Eddie would buy and Dad would run it. He had to make it work and live on the proceeds. The word autonomous was bandied about.

  From there on, Dad appeared to play the game, fitting in quite well with the bar routine and keeping our little family from the poor house. For years we lived over the bar. Later on, Eddie bought us the mansion and persuaded Dad to move. I never knew exactly how the accounts were handled, but Eddie engaged a hot-shit accountant from Manhattan and even a tax accountant in case Dad messed that up as well. For a long time Dad was strict as a sergeant major, rising before dawn, polishing his shoes himself, eating a raw egg before breakfast: all stuff Uncle Eddie favored or advised. Even then, I knew there was no way Eddie was shining his own shoes. But I said nothing, knowing The Importance of Shoe Shining in the Family. Back in Monaghan, nobody shined their shoes, if they had any. A school photo of Dad showed most of the kids had no shoes at all—only Dad in the front row had a good pair of black boots, black socks, short pants, and a black turtleneck. I reckoned he was taken out of school shortly after that to work in the fields, until Eddie sent him the ticket for Canada.

  On certain sections of the streets there were signs of the usual fracas of the previous night: bottles and cans and overturned garbage. In recent times, crowds of young local men gathered at night to drink and carouse, as if they belonged to a different species, married to the night. Sometimes they didn’t even bother going to a bar. Sometimes bar owners use the tobacco ban to keep them out. Visitors slumming the bars at night made a helluva noise while they were there, then again as they revved up to leave. Residents complained about them as much as they did about the youngsters, who sold and smoked weed and giggled a lot, then kicked the garbage out of the cans and around the street. I had known most of them since they were kids—they were Sean’s age. I wondered if Sean spent time with them, but didn’t dare ask. So far they’d left me and the bar alone, and although there was increasing talk of hate crimes and savage attacks in the night, I couldn’t see them being the perps. For the moment, anyone kicked down subway steps had been openly gay or Muslim—or even black—but I knew that could change.

  * * *

  “So you rich fucks get up for a little while every day?” My friend George was standing in the doorway of his restaurant.

  “Gid adda here,” I grinned.

  “Whadaya like, I gad it,” said George, waving me in.

  “Check the shop and be right back.”

  * * *

  I entered the dark interior of The Two Way Inn. It was quiet but for an Abba song coming at low volume from the jukebox: I don’t wanna talk . . . about things we been through . . . The usual lineup of men drinking silently in the late morning never failed to remind me of a scene from an O’Neill play. There was no green, no shamrocks, no Irish beers, no black-and-white pictures of small villages, whiskey mirrors, leprechauns, shillelaghs, no objects made of bog turf, nothing Irish visible. The occasional token of a German past remained undisturbed, for here the Swamp Rat had no influence and didn’t like the atmosphere. No fucking compliance here, feng shui or otherwise. For a long time a German firm continued to provide German songs for the old jukebox until we updated. One of these songs survived: “Oh Mein Papa,” due to popular demand, had been remastered and now kept company with the Carpenters, Abba, Maureen McGovern, Roberta Flack, the O’Jays, John Denver, and—as they say—much, much more. The bar had remained untouched for so long that it was becoming popular with the yuppie crowd out from Manhattan. It was mentioned in one or two hip magazines in search of “awthennic” places to spend their money. The barmen were instructed to charge more in the evenings. I invested in chairs and tables for the sidewalk, and after being fined twice for putting them out, eventually paid for a licence. These days I pay smoking fines, although we try to stop ’em smoking till the cops have gone to bed. Because what interests the yuppies is the interior, and the music. If it’s like a stage set for me, how much more must it be for them?

  I waved through the open kitchen door to our Mexican factotum (Dad’s title for him). He navigated between the kitchen here, the corridors of the apartments above, and the garden on 12th Street.

  “Buenos dias, Pepe,” I said. “Que pasa?”

  “Land of the free and the brave,” replied Pepe.

  I nodded to the young man behind the bar, an ex-seminarian from the old country, solid as an Aran Island, robbing only exactly enough so as not to make it obvious and rock the boat for the other bartenders doing the same.

  “Gimme a shot from the real bottle you keep under the bar,” said one of the O’Neill characters. “The curate isn’t cooperating.”

  I nodded again at the young man. “Go ahead,” I said, “what they have there wouldn’t fill a hole in their tooth.”

  The young man ran a round down the bar: He had instructions to give them every third drink free, but to go easy on the non-fiddled bottle.

  “Come on, lads, put yer hearts into it.” This was another of Dad’s goads. “Ye’ll never get cirrhosis the way ye’re drinkin’.”

  The young man handed me the morning mail, which reminded me of the letter from Canada. I reached into a pocket, fished it out, and sat at a table. No one sat at a table except in the evenings.

  The letter was typed. This didn’t look good. It was from a lawyer. My eyes shot to the bottom paragraph: It is with regret that we must inform you of the intention of Mr. Edward Nulty to dispose of his properties in Astoria.

  Alerted, no doubt, by press references to a property boom, I thought. More warehouse conversions and hoardings bearing the legend, Jesus hates this building.

  Do not hesitate to contact us should you have any questions, the letter finished. It gave the coordinates of some fancy broker in Manhattan who would contact me instanter.

  I hated the British tone of it all. I even hated their tight vowels up there. I wondered what had stung Eddie into action. I folded the letter and put it in my pocket. The O’Neill characters who had been studying me turned back to their drinks again.

  I got up, nodded to the company, and made my way next door to George, who had lunch ready.

  “You donna looka good.”

  “No.”

  “You dyin’?”

  “No.”

  “Yo’ family die?”

  “No.”

  “So then!” George handed me a glass of his special heavy aperitif wine.

  “Ya mass,” he said. I said nothing. “You looza all yor money?” George had been imitating his father’s accent for so long and spending three months a year in Greece that it was second nature. He looked anxious. Money was serious.

  “Maybe.”

  George was all attention. “Money is not love,” he said slowly.

  “I
got neither.”

  “First, you eat.”

  It seemed to me there were more of the little white plates than usual. I told George my woes, as I often do. What had once been a place serving hero sandwiches had become a high-class restaurant. Through the kitchen door I could see two Indians hard at work. And I’m not talking about Native Americans. Behind a little desk sat George’s brother Lazarus, once short-order cook and pea soup expert, and his sister Hermione. They were all getting on in years.

  The phone in the kitchen rang. One of the Indians answered it. “007!” he said, and giggled. “Bond, James Bond!” He was laughing so hard the other Indian had to take the phone from him.

  Above our heads hung photos of George’s parents and grandparents on the whitewashed terrace of a modest house in Cyprus. The men were dressed as popes, the women in black. They’d heard that the house had long since made way for a pink Turkish villa. None of them had ever tried to go back, even when it became possible.

  “Eat.”

  George forced food on me like I remembered my mother doing before she vanished. He raised his glass and said, “Eleftheria i thanatos.”

  I nodded, repeated the words, and drank deeply.

  Freedom or death.

  * * *

  Me and George took a stroll in Astoria Park to walk off the wine. We stopped to lean on the rail and look at the garbage floating in the water below. I wanted to drop into the Noguchi Garden Museum. I loved the smooth control and order of the marble and granite pieces. It reassured me.

  George refused. “The fuck? All that cold stone giva me the creeps.”

  “Some Greek you are,” I said.

  “Malaka. Irish fucks only let gays and lesbians into their parade this year, for the foist time! St. Pat’s for all, my ass!”

  “Greeks’d know all about gays.”

  “We’re all getting old,” said George.