I shook my head.
“One of the Five Families. Daughter of a capo. Vicky is connected like nobody is connected. Which … I don’t know if she uses it or not. But she’s big, man. Don’t cross her.”
I didn’t tell him I slept with her, and I don’t think he guessed.
* * *
I confronted my father. “What have you done to me? Vicky Castellano! Jesus Christ…!”
“The world has got two kinds of guys, Len,” he said calmly. “You and I ain’t Rockefellers or Vanderbilts. And we never will be, no matter what we do or don’t do. Or uptown Jews, either. You’re Uncle Harry’s great-nephew. Your mother was a … I guess you know by now. A nude dancer. Not a hooker, by God, not anything like, but a nude dancer. Me, I’m—”
“You’re not Mafia!”
He paused for a moment. “No. But I’m not holier than thou, either—like your father-in-law.”
He’d hit me there. I had a failing marriage, and one reason it was failing was that my wife’s family never ceased to look down on me. The son of Jerry Cooper would never be good enough—no matter what he achieved—to be Sue Ellen’s husband.
“Vicky can do a hell of a lot for you,” he went on. “Already has. Besides which … tell me she’s not the sweetest piece of ass you’ve ever had.”
“She’s Sicilian,” I grumbled sullenly.
“Hey! Whatsa matter with you? Arnold Rothstein was not Sicilian. Neither was Dutch Schultz. Neither was Bugsy Siegel. Neither was Meyer Lansky. And—ha!—neither is Sol Schwartz.”
“There’s a relationship,” I said. “I mean—”
“Of trust,” he interrupted me. “If I’d ever wanted to be connected, maybe I could have arranged it. I never wanted it. I don’t want it. But Vicky Lucchese is a source. Your law firm understands that. And if it doesn’t, fuck it. Vicky can do more for you than Gottsman, Scheck and Shapiro. And a hell of a lot more for you than Sue Ellen and her father.”
* * *
I don’t know how soon Sue Ellen began to suspect that I was seeing another woman. When I began to stay in town overnight three or four nights a week, I suppose. She called one night after midnight, checking up on me. I was in my father’s guest room, as I’d told her I would be. I talked to her for ten minutes that night, while Vicky went in the bathroom, sat on the closed toilet seat, and read.
“How many nights a week you have to stay in town?” Sue Ellen asked peevishly.
“It’s business, honey,” I said.
“What kind of business? I’ve started to think it’s funny business, lover. You don’t come home like a guy who hasn’t had any since night before last.”
“Law business,” I said. “I was with a client until just half an hour ago.”
Vicky smirked.
“Your voice sounds funny.”
“I was with people who smoked.”
What was funny was my struggle to speak in a normal voice, since Vicky had come out of the bathroom and stood nude, hands on her hips, grinning at me.
“You’ll come home some night and there won’t be any for you.” She hung up.
“We’re gonna have to come to a conclusion,” Vicky said as I put down the telephone.
“I know.”
“I’m too old to commit myself to a relationship with no future.”
“Yes.”
“Well … we have to think about it.”
Anyway, Sue Ellen was jealous without knowing why she should be. And I was playing with fire.
Sue Ellen continued to study Chinese and became fluent. So did Mollie. One day she announced that she and Mollie wanted to go to China for a month. Her father would put up part of the cost, and she wondered how much we could afford to pay. I was doing all right at the firm, but I was not doing well enough to fund an extended trip to China while meeting all the other obligations we had. Would my father contribute as her father was? He contributed enough, and one late-summer day Sue Ellen and Mollie boarded a plane at Kennedy and flew to Hong Kong, from where they would make excursions into China.
Vicky was pleased. She rented a love nest for us—complete with a telephone that would ring in my father’s apartment so that he or Melissa could switch the call as if only sending it to the extension in the guest bedroom.
It was an adventure to live with Vicky.
I was not an experienced lover. I had dated, but I had never had sex with any woman but Sue Ellen and Mollie until I met Vicky. Sue Ellen, still in her twenties, had gained a little weight. She was not heavy, but she was a little looser than she had been when I married her. Vicky, who was eighteen years older than Sue Ellen, had a perfect body. Vicky’s body was no longer youthful, but it was taut and flawlessly proportioned. Sue Ellen, though the daughter of Boston Brahmins, had a slightly dusky complexion. Her skin was smooth but not glossy. It was as if road dust had been used to powder her all over. Vicky’s skin was almost white, and her big, shiny, vivid-pink nipples were in distinct contrast to the white skin of her breasts. Because she shaved her crotch, the darker pink of her inner parts showed whenever her legs were more than a little apart.
Three words did not yet pass between Vicky and me. “I love you.” We didn’t say it. I wouldn’t have dared say it unless she said it first, though I did, in fact, love her. I still could not guess exactly what she felt for me. I know she didn’t want her sixteen-year-old son to meet her twenty-six-year-old lover. Beyond that … she was caring. She was generous. She was mysterious.
She was also the only woman I ever experienced who could suck my entire scrotum and testicles into her mouth—or ever wanted to.
31
JERRY
By early 1978 Giselle and I had to accept the fact that she was dying. Cancer. I had avoided the specific subject before because I was not sure I could handle it.
She was not afraid. Her chief worry was that I would not be able to rear Len properly, and she asked me for certain promises about that. I was to see to it that he got a fine education and entered a learned profession. He was not to become a street hustler. He was not to be like Buddy. What she meant, of course, was that he was not to be like me. We might have a fine, successful business, she and I, but I had started out a street hustler, and, whatever Len became, he was not to start that way.
The only question was, would we tell him she was dying? We agreed not to. The shock would be bad enough. Anticipation would be worse. It was worse for me. It nearly destroyed me. If not for the knowledge that I had a son to raise, I think it might have led me to suicide. I am honestly not at all sure I would be alive today if it had not been for my son. I couldn’t abandon him. I could readily have abandoned everything and everyone else.
I suppose most people think there is nothing worse than dying. There is something worse: having to watch someone you love die, knowing you are going to have to live on. That, believe me, is much, much worse.
When the end was near, I took her to France. She wanted to see her daughters, the ones she’d had by Jean Pierre Martin. She also wanted to see her sister.
Her daughter Jacqueline was married and the mother of a little girl. Her daughter Jeanne was not married but was the mother of a son. Her sister Therèse—the one who had collaborated with the Nazis and had been marched naked through the streets with a shaved head—lived quietly in Lyon in the family home, with a wine merchant her own age, and seemed to have been forgiven by the city. I suppose people remembered, but by then the whole French nation, not just its collaborators, knew it had something to be ashamed of.
Giselle died in Lyon. She was fifty-two years old.
* * *
Sometimes I called Sal by his real name, which was Sol. At first he didn’t like it, but when he saw he couldn’t bully me out of it, he accepted it.
He went through girlfriends like shit through a goose. Truda, the big fat girl who modeled for us, lasted a year or so. I remember a Jeannie and a Suzie. Most of the names I don’t recall. I didn’t even meet all of them.
He was very ki
nd to me when I lost Giselle. He met me at the airport and drove me up to Lodge. He didn’t even go in. He waited for me in the parking lot. He knew Len didn’t like him and figured the boy was enduring enough pain without a visit from his Uncle Sal. I was touched by how sensitive Sal could be.
* * *
Sal knew our designer, Larkin Albert, of course. One day the three of us sat down over lunch at 21.
Albert had become a great deal more—how shall I say it? He had become more skilled, more artistic, more subtle, in his cross-dressing. He sat there in 21, smooth and self-confident, assured that no one in the room guessed he was a man. He wore an ivory jaquard suit: padded shoulders, button-front jacket, slim miniskirt. It was entirely appropriate to 21. His makeup was understated. His wig was styled to expose half his forehead and his ears and earrings. I can’t guess what he used to suppress his beard and other hair, but his face and legs were as smooth as any girl’s.
Sal asked the question I would not have asked. “Tell me, Lark, have you had the operation?”
“No, for Christ’s sake,” Larkin said in an amused, velvety voice. “What would I do for fun, if I…? Well … Sal, I’m not one of those guys! So far as doin’ it is concerned, I’m as straight as … well, as I suppose you two are.”
“I guess there are all kinds of guys,” said Sal.
“You better believe it,” said Larkin. He glanced across the room. “See the suit with the big Bloody Mary?”
He had used the term “suit” aptly. Nixon vest. John Dean haircut. Rep tie. Wing-tips. Smoking a cigarillo. This … creature said Wall Street, said broker, said lawyer. It could have worked in the Nixon White House.
“She’s a broad,” said Larkin. “She hasn’t noticed me, but I’ve noticed her, and I’m here to tell you she’s a first-class piece of tail.”
“Explain this to me,” I said.
Larkin smiled. “You’re sitting here. Sal’s sitting here. Of the three of us, I’m the only one’s who’s charged! Man, if one of you groped me, I’d come! And Mary Beth over there—which is her name—is wet. I mean, she’s ready! We may be the only ones in the room who are having a really good time.”
“You don’t wish you were a woman?” I asked.
“Are you kiddin’? Hell, no, I don’t wish I were a woman. And Mary Beth doesn’t wish she were a man. Guys … I get off by dippin’ my wick—and I don’t mean by dippin’ it between the teeth of some fag.”
We changed the subject. Sort of. Larkin led off.
“Listen to me, guys. I’m wearing a pair of silicone boobs. I don’t mean implants. I mean silicone boobs in my bra. If I took off my bra, they’d fall off. But if I let you see them through a sheer bra, you’d think you were looking at real boobs. You could feel me up, and you wouldn’t immediately feel the difference. If one of you felt me right now, through my dress and all, you’d swear you had your hands on real tits. These little babies are imported from Germany, and they cost me five hundred bucks a pair. Well, shit, man, why doesn’t Cheeks sell silicone tits?”
It was something Giselle would have objected to. She loved merchandise that showed off a woman at her best. Anything that dishonestly enhanced her, Giselle did not like.
“The krauts got a patent on these things?” Sal asked.
“Can you patent false tits?” Larkin asked. “I don’t know, but I doubt it. If you can, it must be easy enough to put together a different chemical combination that would do the same thing in a different way. I can’t think it would be too difficult.”
It was a departure for Cheeks, the first of a series that would change the nature of the business.
The German company did not in fact have a patent on their silicone breast enhancers. What else to call them? But they manufactured them beautifully, and we signed a contract to import them at $186 a pop. We sold them for $400.
They came in a variety of sizes, ranging from rather thin ones that changed a girl from an A to a B, all the way to the kind that Larkin wore, to give a person with no tits at all a luscious bustline. They could not have changed, say, Larkin into a Dolly Parton. But they very convincingly changed him into a believable woman.
“Hell,” Larkin had said. “When the word gets around that we sell these, we’ll sell fifty to women for every one we sell to a man. I guarantee it.”
The ratio was more like ten thousand to one. Millions of women wanted bigger tits, but they didn’t want two things: first, they didn’t want to wear those hideous pads of rubber and kapok called falsies, and, second, they didn’t want surgery.
What a business! But it was, as Giselle would have emphasized, a departure for us.
I put my foot down against one thing. Silicone boobs, maybe. Rubber cocks, no. Sal and Larkin couldn’t see the difference, but I could and vetoed merchandising fake penises.
I consented to the sale of a device called an Arab strap. It was a contraption of straps and buckles that went around the penis and down under the balls, holding the penis up in an unnatural erection, caused chiefly by the constriction of the veins in the shaft. In point of fact, the thing was a little bit dangerous. Interfering with the circulation of the blood was not the world’s greatest idea, and after a short time I banished the Arab strap from Cheeks stores.
32
We continued to import about half our merchandise, most of it from France but an increasing amount from places like Hong Kong and Manila and Singapore. What we didn’t import came from contractors hired by Charlie Han. He was an important element of our success.
Charlie had become almost a partner in Cheeks. He was not just a small-time sweatshop manager anymore. He was an entrepreneur, running a score of sweatshops through layers of subcontractors. We hadn’t made him that. He had many customers, and he sewed into his clothes the labels of some of the most prominent chains of stores in the nation. He also sewed in the labels of important designers.
What is more, he was not just the maker of underwear and swimsuits; his laborers assembled blouses and skirts, jeans and jackets, dresses and suits.
He didn’t do business any longer from a table in a coffee shop. His office was in a building on Twenty-seventh Street—isolated and well insulated from the grimy lofts where his employees worked under the tyrannical supervision of his managers. He had the kind of smarts that Buddy admired, and he had used them to grow.
By now Charlie could have made a colorable case that he didn’t know the working conditions in his shops—and in fact he would, when he had to.
And if he could make the case, we could make it. This was the deal. This was the way it worked. We could pretend innocence. In truth, I had visited Charlie’s sweatshops once or twice, and that had been enough; I had not gone back anymore. I could testify, if need be, that we bought our merchandise from various makers, including Charlie Han, and had no idea what were the working conditions in the shops where our clothes were sewn. We were not obligated, under the law, to inspect the factories of our suppliers.
As Sal kept reminding me, this was the garment industry, and Cheeks wasn’t big enough to change it. Other companies might be, but they had no interest in changing it.
Charlie did get in trouble once. Federal inspectors found a lot of violations of various laws in a loft on Thirty-fifth Street, and they traced the ownership to Charlie Han—that is, they thought they had traced the ownership.
Charlie was arrested, hustled out of his office in handcuffs, taken before a federal magistrate, jailed briefly, and then released on bond—protesting all the while that he did not own or manage the loft where they found all the violations.
He was indicted on six counts nevertheless, and in the fall of 1979 his case came to trial.
I was shaking. Among the merchandise found in the sweatshop were things we sold in Cheeks stores.
I sent a lawyer to observe the trial. He bought a copy of the transcript on the testimony I would be interested in.
MR. JULIUS: Mr. Han, I hand you an article of clothing. I suppose we must call it a pair of
panties. What had you to do with the manufacture of that article?
JUDGE GRIFFITH: There will be no laughter or other noise from the spectators in the courtroom.
MR. HAN: Nothing.
MR. JULIUS: Please read the label in that article of clothing.
MR. HAN: It reads, “Cheeks. Intimate apparel.”
MR. JULIUS: What is Cheeks?
MR. HAN: It is a seller of women’s intimate apparel.
MR. JULIUS: Have you ever been involved in the manufacture of merchandise for Cheeks?
MR. HAN: I was at one time, briefly. Some years ago.
MR. JULIUS: How many years ago?
MR. HAN: To the best of my recollection, twelve or fifteen years ago. About that. Something like that.
MR. JULIUS: Do you do any business with Cheeks today?
MR. HAN: Yes.
MR. JULIUS: What kind of business?
MR. HAN: I am a manufacturers’ representative; in other words, a salesman. When one of my manufacturers comes up with something I think might appeal to Cheeks, I show it to them.
MR. JULIUS: Obviously this pair of panties was manufactured for this Cheeks company. It has their label sewn in it.
MR. HAN: Cheeks bought the entire supply of that item. That’s what it usually does, buys all of an item, together with the exclusive right to merchandise it.
MR. JULIUS: How many pairs of these panties did Cheeks buy?
MR. HAN: I think a thousand dozen.
MR. JULIUS: You have said you never saw the sweatshop in which these panties and a lot of other items were made. Is that your testimony?
MR. HAN: I deal with the executives of the companies I represent, in their offices or mine. I never go to their manufacturing facilities.
MR. JULIUS: With whom did you deal in securing a thousand dozen pairs of these panties for sale to Cheeks?
MR. HAN: I dealt with Mr. George Alexander, vice president for sales, Alexander and Company. It is a family business.
MR. JULIUS: Where is Mr. Alexander now?
MR. HAN: I haven’t seen him for some time.
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