Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

by Jimmy Breslin

  “You could go and fuck yourself!” he shouts at Goldstein.

  Every time Kid Sally comes onto this scene in his mind, his stomach begins turning over and he has trouble thinking, and he snarls at Goldstein and the snarl comes up out of Kid Sally’s insides and right into the present. And Kid Sally, standing in front of his mirror, moves his mouth around the cigarette. He snarls.

  “You could go and fuck yourself!”

  “Hey! What you say this for?”

  Big Mama had come into the bedroom with her hands on her hips.

  “Nothin’,” Kid Sally said.

  “You watch-a you mouth in the house,” Big Mama said.

  Big Mama is a short, wrinkled woman with a parrot’s bill for a nose. Her gray hair is pulled back in a bun. Her dark brown eyes move quickly. She was dressed in traditional Italian mourning black: black dress, black stockings, black tie-lace shoes. Big Mama’s husband, a game but inept extortionist, died twenty-three years ago.

  Kid Sally calls her Big Mama because he grew up in an apartment with both his mother, whom he called Little Mama, and his grandmother, who became Big Mama. His mother died of pneumonia when he was nine. The father, Papa Albert Palumbo, did nine years in jail for being an accessory after the fact of a murder. Albert got to the scene too late to do the thing himself, as contracted, but he did arrive just in time to be seen stuffing the body into a cement-mixer. He died a year after he got out of prison. Big Mama raised Kid Sally Palumbo and watched with pride while he headed for stardom, with her urging him on.

  “Now you know what to do?” she said to Kid Sally.

  “Yeah.”

  “Make sure you know what to do.”

  “Yop.”

  She whispered, “Just remember, all these others, they bassets. Rat bassets.”

  Kid Sally’s face brightened. Big Mama always made him feel strong. Like the day he was sitting in the back of the courtroom with Big Mama while they waited for an assault case to be called. It was one of Kid Sally’s first contracts for Baccala, and he had beaten up the wrong guy. The victim let out a sucker’s holler. Kid Sally and Big Mama sat in the brown-paneled courtroom and there was a case on before Kid Sally’s and the lawyer in the front of the courtroom was questioning a Negro kid who was on the stand.

  “Now the racial tensions in your neighborhood are the result of it being a Negro neighborhood, isn’t that correct?” the lawyer said.

  “Ahont know,” the black kid said.

  “Well, are there many Negro families living in your neighborhood?”

  “Guess so.”

  “Tell me about the block you live on. What kind of people live on your block?”

  “Le’s see. There’s eight houses that got all Negro people livin’ in them, then there’s one white family, and then we got one eyetalian family.”

  “Mulagnon!” Big Mama screamed from the back of the courtroom.

  “Rat mulagnon basset!” Big Mama was on her feet now, shaking a finger at the black kid on the witness stand.

  “You, you, you—you get you ass whipped.”

  The judge was directing a court attendant to grab her, and the lawyer, a little man with a mustache, whirled around and shouted, “Please!”

  “Jew mocky lawyer!” Big Mama yelled.

  The judge, Irish, took no real offense at this. He only had Big Mama and Kid Sally thrown out of the room.

  Out in the hallway, Big Mama got up on her tiptoes and looked through the small pane in the door and put the Evil Eye on everybody inside. Kid Sally stood next to her and felt great.

  Kid Sally ran manicured fingernails, the polish glistening in the light, over the scar on his right cheek. The scar was one of the prices he has paid for this uncertainty that runs through him sometimes. Once, very early in his career, he was assigned to a good arson job by the Baccala family. His job was to do whatever the arsonist, Benny the Bug, wanted. A row of five attached shops, all losing business in a changing neighborhood, had formed a sort of association and paid Benny to turn their businesses into a large empty lot. Benny spent hours splashing gasoline in the cellars of the stores. He had Kid Sally flatten out the empty gas cans and take them to Erie Basin and throw them in the water. If a fire marshal finds an old gas can in the ruins, he will report this to the police, which is very bad, and to the insurance company, which is far worse. After careful checking, Benny the Bug left the scene and repaired to an el station overlooking the stores. One of the merchants, who had the dry-goods store on the end of the row, was with him. The merchant was worried about a good fire wall in his store.

  “You’re dealing with professionals,” Benny told the merchant.

  Presently flames began showing in the windows of the first four stores. Nothing showed from the dry-goods store. “I tol’ you,” the dry-goods-store man wailed. Benny took out a dollar cigar, licked it with his tongue, then put it in his mouth. All the stores erupted in smoke. The dry-goods shop remained solid. “Ohhhhh!” the shopkeeper moaned. The front of the dry-goods store then blew out into the middle of the street The roof turned into a geyser of timbers, bricks, and tar paper. A side wall exploded and disintegrated. The flames licked at the fire wall like it was candy.

  Benny the Bug took the cigar out of his mouth and sneered at the merchant next to him.

  “Nuclear,” Benny the Bug said.

  Kid Sally Palumbo thought he knew the whole game after that day. He pestered Baccala for arson jobs he could handle himself. Baccala gave him a special, a nightclub in Greenwood Lake which was owned by a cousin of Baccala’s and which was losing money. This made the nightclub a candidate for the usual restaurant fire, a grease fire in the kitchen, helped along by fifteen gallons of gasoline. Kid Sally sloshed gasoline all over the place late one night. He kept remembering all the things Benny the Bug had done. He was satisfied that he had done everything. He started a small fire in a corner and stepped outside. He strode out like Mussolini. “Beautiful,” he said to Tony the Indian, who was waiting in the car. Kid Sally’s foot hit something. He looked down to see a gas can. He had forgotten to pick up the gas cans. Kid Sally ran back to the nightclub just as the place exploded. Flying glass cut Kid Sally’s face. The next day fire marshals found four gas cans in the embers.

  “If Eisenhower owned the place we wouldn’t pay,” an insurance adjuster said.

  Kid Sally looked carefully at the scar on his cheek, then stepped back and put the English Ovals in his inside jacket pocket. Sinatra keeps his cigarettes there.

  “Take care,” Kid Sally said to Big Mama.

  He walked out of his bedroom and into a hallway. The staircase going down to the street is in the middle of a dark hallway. Tony the Indian went down the stairs first. As Kid Sally started down, a door at the far end of the hallway opened and a girl with a pink quilted robe pulled around her stood with the light from her room flooding around her. She had long black hair and off-olive skin. Oriental eyebrows slashed away at an angle from long narrow eyes.

  “You going out this late?” she said.

  “He got business,” Big Mama called out. “You in college. You keep studying. That’s-a you business. He got-a his business.”

  “Take care,” Kid Sally said.

  “You take care,” the girl said.

  She shut the door. Kid Sally started down the stairs. Big Mama leaned over the banisters. “You forget,” she whispered. She was holding out a black pistol.

  “I don’t need it,” Kid Sally said.

  “All right. But you watch you ass.”

  Chapter 5

  KID SALLY BOUNCED DOWN the stairs and through the scarred vestibule and came out onto the street. The building Kid Sally lives in is two stories of old brick with a storefront office taking up the first floor. Gold lettering on the streaked window says ACE VENDING MACHINE. This is a business he ran. His people stole pistachio nuts from the big Washington Market and filled machines with them and put the machines into bars. It was a fair business, but then the Washington Market moved up t
o the Bronx and security was tighter at the new place and nobody could steal pistachio nuts, so Ace Vending went out of business.

  Beppo the Dwarf, with hair hanging in his face, sat in the office. The office was a good place to sit because it wasn’t cold like the street. The dwarf had on a plaid short-sleeved sport-shirt. He sat at a scarred desk. The wall behind the dwarf was covered with a poster of the front of a nude girl lying on a fat right hip. When the dwarf saw Kid Sally standing outside the office, he twisted around in the straight-backed chair. He got onto his knees, stood up straight, and then got way up on his toes and leaned out and kissed the girl on the poster somewhere around the top of the legs.

  “That Beppo, he’s crazy,” Kid Sally said.

  “You bet he’s crazy,” Tony the Indian said.

  In the office, Beppo the Dwarf stood clapping his hands. He had just touched on one of the major sore points of all gangsters, and he knew he was small enough to get away with it. From the day a man is inducted into the Mafia he feels he is God or, at the very least, Saint Michael the Archangel. This ego, coupled with the normal lack of imagination and caring which goes with his IQ, makes the average hoodlum the worst sex partner imaginable. “I’d rather have a cold German than a hot wise guy,” Sandra the Hooker announced one night. To overcome this, the wise guys will do anything to leave a girl feeling thrilled, up to, including, and mainly the little scene Beppo had just acted out with the poster. If there is one thing a Mafia guy fears, outside of a narcotics conviction, it is having the girl tell anybody what he does to her.

  “If you ever tell,” Tony the Indian warned his girl friend one night, “I’ll choke you on the throat and make your eyes fall out.”

  The building Kid Sally lives in is in the middle of the block. The block is made up of single-story tan stucco laundry-truck garages set between four- and five-story tenements that have fire escapes creeping down their fronts. The block seeps to an end against dreary wharves which are part of the South Brooklyn waterfront. A lone tanker, with only a couple of small lights showing on the bridge, sat in the oil-covered water.

  On Marshall Street, men could get up in the morning to work with baling hooks as longshoremen. Or they could go out at dusk with a gun. “We got to steal because they don’t let us in, we’re Italian,” Kid Sally said. Of course, Italians were spreading rapidly through politics, medicine, and law. Any bad name was coming from the two thousand mobsters who sullied millions. Upon arrest, Mafia hoods screamed discrimination.

  This situation once led Nathan Glaser, director of the Brooklyn Regional Social Security Office, to observe, “These people don’t take out Social Security cards even once in their lives. If we had a few more places like Marshall Street we’d be mailing tambourines to retired people.”

  Kid Sally Palumbo and Tony the Indian started up the cracked sidewalk toward the corner. Kid Sally’s shoulders swung, and his legs were close together. His steps began with the toes and the balls of his feet pushing against his big black thick new shoes. Kid Sally had spent a long time learning how to walk this way. An alert, quick walk is rare in a poor neighborhood. People usually react to environment right down to their feet. In crumbling surroundings people walk with a wide, aimless gait. On Marshall Street a woman going to buy tripe for dinner slumps into three or four people each way. On Madison Avenue, women coming for fittings swing their legs out of taxicabs and flick across the sidewalk through a wall of businessmen without bumping. On Marshall Street, only Kid Sally Palumbo, who is trying to be a general in the Mafia, has direction to his stride.

  Tony the Indian went to one of a row of brown-doored garages near the corner. He opened the doors and went in and backed out a black Cadillac. Kid Sally shut the doors and got into the car. Ten minutes later Tony the Indian slowed the car as it came to the corner of a dark street. He inched the car past the building line of a red brick supermarket. Kid Sally looked down the neon-lit sidewalk of Flatbush Avenue. It was empty. Tony the Indian hit the gas and the car swerved around the corner and came to a stop, tires squealing, in a flood of neon formed by a long sign:

  THE ENCHANTED HOUR

  A poster in one window said:

  INDOOR CLAM BAKE, SUNDAY

  AFTERNOONS. CHICKEN CACCIATORE,

  LINGUINE AND GO GO GIRLS!

  The noise of the tires squealing made the people near the windows in the Enchanted Hour look out. They saw Kid Sally Palumbo step out onto the sidewalk and march like Mussolini to the door. Tony the Indian swung around the car after him. Kid Sally waited at the door for Tony to open it. Kid Sally arranged his lips in a Tommy Udo sneer. Then he walked into the Enchanted Hour and he could feel everybody in the place looking at him.

  “Hey!” somebody said to Kid Sally. He nodded and kept walking.

  “Hey!” somebody else said. Kid Sally nodded again.

  Kid Sally went down the bar to an empty black leather stool. He stood alongside the stool. Never sit. You sit and you look all bent over. Kid Sally stood at the bar with the English Oval hanging from his bottom lip and his chin out and his chest out and his shirt cuffs showing nice, feeling real soft and good on his wrists. The mirror behind the bar made everything look blue because the place was so dark. Kid Sally tilted his chin higher, and the smoke came out of his nose and mouth at the same time. One stream of blue smoke running up and one stream of blue smoke coming down. In the mirror, Kid Sally saw a guy who really knows what he’s doing. Good People, Kid Sally said to himself.

  He put a hundred-dollar bill on the bar. His index finger waved. “Take care of us, here,” he said.

  The bartender flung himself in front of Kid Sally. “Scotch?”

  “For me and my friend.” The finger waved. “And buy the bar a drink.”

  The bartender nodded. He threw straight scotches and water in front of Kid Sally and Tony the Indian. Then he ran up and down the rest of the bar, filling the order. Kid Sally would borrow at shylock interest rates before he would put anything less than a hundred-dollar bill on the bar at the Enchanted Hour.

  A short guy in a black suit came down the bar and stood with him.

  “You got somethin’ for me, pal?” Kid Sally said.

  “The guy give me long stories,” the little guy said.

  “What stories?” Kid Sally said.

  “I think he’s a broken-down suitcase,” the little guy said. “I don’t know if he got.”

  Kid Sally was leaning against the bar. He pushed away from it and stood up straight, his shoulders squaring.

  “Who does this guy think he is? I’m going to break both his legs and throw in a arm for good measure,” Kid Sally said. “Who is this guy, not payin’? Does he know who he’s doin’ business with?”

  “I told him it was good people,” the little guy said.

  “I’m gonna do what I have to do,” Kid Sally said.

  “I tol’ him,” the little guy said.

  Kid Sally looked at the little guy. “All right,” he said. The little guy left. Kid Sally turned back and looked at himself in the mirror. Huh. The whole place was looking at him. They all got respect for Kid Sally Palumbo, he told himself. He began to think of the day when he could walk into the big places in Manhattan, the Copa and Jilly’s, and get the respect the big guys over there get.

  At his left elbow was a small railing that separates the regular bar from the service bar. The service bar has an aluminum top for draining. The red and blue neon from the jukebox was reflected in watery light on the aluminum. The waitress, her long black hair swinging across her shoulderblades, brushed behind Kid Sally and came up to the service bar, just on the other side of the little railing. She put a tray down on the aluminum.

  “One C.C. and water, a vodka gimlet, and two Dewar’s on the rocks,” she said.

  Kid Sally took his shot glass of scotch and flicked it down in a gulp.

  The waitress stood at the aluminum with her lips pursed. She clucked in rhythm to the music from the jukebox.

  The bartender was reaching for
a bottle on the back bar to start filling her order. Kid Sally put his shot glass down. He waited until the bartender was right in the middle of reaching for the bottle.

  “Take care of me and my friend,” Kid Sally said. His finger waved.

  The bartender stopped in the middle of his motion. He grimaced. Then he turned around with a big smile. “Sure, Sally Kid,” he said.

  The waitress looked at Kid Sally. “Really!”

  Kid Sally made his Tommy Udo sneer.

  “You!” the waitress said.

  Kid Sally felt great. He loved being a big shot like this.

  Tony the Indian tapped him on the arm. “That guy is in the booth waitin’ for you.”

  Kid Sally threw down his drink and lit a fresh cigarette. He squared his shoulders. This was a very important match for him. He walked to a booth in the back of the place. He slid in on the empty side. The man sitting opposite him grinned. The man was wearing a hand-stitched light brown glen-plaid suit. His reddish hair was closely cut. He wore hornrimmed glasses. His name was Izzy Cohen and he was Baccala’s chief Jew. The Mafia relies heavily on Jews. Boss gangsters are usually able to count only when they take off their shoes and use their toes. Every big outfit has a Jew who can count money and mastermind gambling and swindling operations. As the hoodlums do not understand exactly what the Jew is doing, but suspect the worst, they threaten the Jew periodically. Baccala always tells Izzy Cohen, “You steal and I make you put you tongue on the third rail.” Izzy Cohen throws up his arms in horror. The next morning he takes out his Jewish revolver, a ballpoint pen, and goes to work and steals some more. Izzy comes out of a family of pushcart peddlers on the East Side of Manhattan. The north end of his brain has clear, almost impressive university tendencies. The south end is cluttered with worms which become active only when the word larceny is programed into them. This situation makes Izzy Cohen a literate thief. As the master figure man for the Brooklyn mob, he is thought to be as brilliant as the late Abba Dabba Bernstein. Abba Dabba worked for Dutch Schultz and became famous for his ability to fix the Cincinnati Clearing House total, used for policy numbers payoffs.