The effect this character had on the assemblage was nothing short of remarkable. I’ve never seen a man dominate a room the way he did, and without doing a damn thing except showing up. Although I had no idea who he might be, I could see the respect he engendered in the eyes of the coppers and of the various personages of low birth or avocation that surrounded yours truly in his time of tribulation. If my complaint against Branagan had stopped the show, it was nothing when set against this ambulatory accusation.
“Tell ’em what?” demanded the apparition. “Anyt’ing Callahoon gotta say ’ready been said to me and he ain’t said nottin’ or else I’da knowed. In fact,” and now he was addressing the entire room, “da least said about anyt’ing da better.”
As well as I came to know him later, it’s impossible for me to give an accurate impression of the quality of his speech. So I invite you to imagine a sound that rumbled up from somewhere below the new Interborough Rapid Transit lines that were even then undermining our neighborhood and then was crushed through a smelter and finally pushed out of a voice box that may have belonged to an accordion once a long time ago. The accent was Brooklyn Jewman by way of East Side paddy with a touch of colored: the world of our New York in one appalling package, come to life to give nightmares to all those who dwelled above its surface.
He shambled to a halt just before me. “I know what you seen and you ain’t seen nothing.” All I could manage was a shake of my head, which I hoped he’d interpret that I was agreeing with him, whatever he meant.
Next he turned to Branagan. “And neither has this here copper. Ain’t dat right, Breenihan?”
All eyes were on the copper. “If you say so,” he said with a quiver in his voice, as if Mr. Gluck had just caught him with the better part of himself in young Miss Jenny, and Mr. Gluck carrying a heater.
“Good,” said the troll, setting down on one of the uncomfortable-looking benches that were the room’s only furniture. “For a minute I t’ought dere was goin’ to be some trouble.”
He reached into the recesses of one filthy pocket and produced a pipe, filled with what execrable smoking substance I couldn’t imagine, and struck a match against the wall. The phosphor flared to life and dove into the pipe bowl, there to ignite, flame up and flare out. He took a long deep drag of his troost and looked around the room. Everybody thought he was going to say something else, but everybody was wrong. So we all stood there for a minute or two, watching this leprechaun fill his lungs and exhale, until McDougal spoke up.
“No trouble at all, Monk,” says he, and I could see that his hand was shaking a little.
“Goot,” says the man named Monk. “I gots enuf tribble as is wit’out what I needs more.” He puffed on his pipe a while more and inspected his clothing as he sat.
I can’t say that he was dressed well, but he seemed to take a certain pride in his appearance. His black suit was worn shiny and his dusty derby was a couple of sizes too small, which meant it perched rather than sat atop his head. But what really caught my eye was the Bessie and the pair of brass knuckles that dangled ornamentally from his belt, like a Red Indian’s scalps.
“And how might our friends over Tammany way be today?” ventured McDougal.
I could swear Monk broke wind before answering, which caused a couple of the fallen women to edge away from him, they who were used to almost anything. “Da Wigwam’s foine,” he said. “What I wants now is for my frien’s over dis end of town to be just as fine.” He rose and made his way toward the humbling desk of Sergeant McDougal and while he was no taller than I, he cut it right down to size. “Do we have ourselves an understanding here, Sergeant,” he asked, “or do I have to consult wit’ my cauleegs?”
“I believe we do, sir,” said the much-intimidated sarge. “Why, not two minutes ago, Mr. Mike Callahan here was saying that the lad was working out back or down cellar the night in question, whereas our witness, as the boy himself has pointed out, could well be—in fact, most likely is—mistaken.”
“Well, now, ain’t that interesan’,” said the orangutan, patting me on the shoulder like I was a long-lost pal. “Because you see my good frien’ Mike must be mistooken as to da day. This here yegg was wit’ me the whole time, discussin’ the kits and da boids, not knockin’ anybody onna head, and he what sayz different is just plumb wrong and that’s the end of it.” Monk turned to me. “Ya likes boids, don’t yuz, kid?” he asks me, and I said sure.
“Any furdah questions?” says my new friend to the sergeant.
“None whatsoever,” says McDougal, pounding his gavel down on the desk. “Arrest dismissed for lack of evidence.” The room cheered. The Moores were doing a Pietà imitation off in the corner, but nobody was paying them any mind. Branagan seethed.
“Mike tole me about you, boy,” says my new friend. There was a booger coming out his nose, and rye stains on his tie, and something I took for cat shite on his trousers, but what did I care, he was my new pal, the man who sprung me. “Eastman,” he said, sticking a hairy paw in my face. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
I thought I would fall down right there in a dead faint, for it was only then that I understood that the personage confronting me was none other than the great Monk Eastman his own good Jew self and no mistake, come to save me from my own people and get me started on the proper path to glory, as befitted not my station, which was humble, but my ambition, which was boundless.
Chapter Six
Monk Eastman was the bravest and most violent fellow I ever met. Oh, you can talk about your Legs Diamond and the Dutchman, but in his day, when it came to the rough stuff, Monk had no equal, and that went not only for his tough predecessor Mose the Bowery Boy, homicidal Chinamen like Mock Duck and Gophers like One Lung and Goo Goo but for Paul Kelly most especially as well. It was from Monk that I learned pretty much all the skills that was to stand me in such good stead in my youth, and when I think how close I came to missing the great man entirely, well, no doubt my life would have turned out wholly different.
I was spending a lot of time over on the Lower East Side that late summer and early fall of 1903, so much that the boys back on the West Side had begun to think I had gone over to the other side or something. Now, they knew as well as I did that there was no way I could ever have become an Eastman, much less a Five Pointer, but after all I owed my freedom to Monk, and as tough as the Gophers was, there wasn’t a man of them, not Goo Goo, One Lung nor Happy Jack—who later killed his friend Paddy the Priest in a bar because the man, drunk, asked him why he didn’t laugh out of the other side of his face for a change—was as tough as Monk.
And did he ever have the scars to show for it. Once, when he was shaving, which he did religiously, every day, although he seldom washed his hair or the rest of his body, I counted the knife tracks on his torso: at least a dozen from his neck to his belly button, and probably an equal number below the belt. There was also half a dozen or so bullet wounds, some of them with the bullets still inside him, so that when he climbed on the scales for one of his infrequent medical exams (for Monk swore that the doctors killed more innocent men than the gangsters ever had) or when the cops was weighing him for their records, he used to joke that they had to take off a few pounds for the lead. Not once did I ever hear him complain about this pain or that, although sure some of them slugs must have still been causing him anguish. This was another lesson I learned well from Monk, and it stood me in good stead a few years later.
I’ve said that Monk was ugly, which he was. Monk—or Edward Osterman, to give him his real, although obviously not his Christian, name—came from a respectable Jewish family over Williamsburg way, where his father owned a delicatessen. Monk had a lifelong love for cats and birds, so much so that his Da bought him a pet shop in the hopes that he’d settle down, except that Monk loved his kits and boids so much that he couldn’t bear to part with any of them, and so he usually had a number of the former trailing along after him, and at least one of the latter, a big blue-breasted Utility
King named Hilda who perched on his shoulder as he went about making his daily rounds.
Physically, Monk may have been the spitting image of Piltdown man, but by God was he useful in all the areas which politicians deem important, although and of course in the end he was betrayed by the brass hats and feathered headdresses down the Wigwam he thought were his friends. And it was perhaps this lesson which Monk taught me that turned out to be the most important one of all: that no matter what they say, no matter how sweetly they name the prizes and no matter the promises they make, the men behind the desks are never really your friends, any more than a cheap whore giving you the come-on from her crib window is. Many was the man I seen in our line of work what fell for their worthless assurances, and many the man who lived to regret it, right up to the moment when he took his seat in Old Sparky and some screw threw the switch.
At the time I met Monk, though, he was the Prince of the Gangsters, the undisputed boss of the East Side from Nigger Mike Salter’s Pelham Cafe in Pell Street to Paradise Square, all along the waterfront and as far south as you cared to go before you fell into the harbor. Even the Gophers generally gave the Eastmans a wide berth, although we weren’t averse to mixing it up with them now and then, just for the sport of it. As the Sheriff of the New Irving dance hall, Monk clobbered so many men that the ambulance drivers at Bellevue took to calling the hospital’s accident ward the Eastman Pavilion.
Monk was a master of all manner of mayhem. He could wield a beer bottle, a lead pipe, a shiv, the knucks, a black Bessie and a barking iron with equal aplomb, and generally patrolled his turf armed with a big club, upon which he had notched a tally of his victims. They say that once, lacking a single notch to bring his total to an even fifty, he turned to the fella sitting next to him on a barstool and laid him out stiff.
Being himself impervious to pain, Monk assumed everybody else was as well and treated them accordingly. One of his favorite fighting tactics, as I soon witnessed, was to break a beer or wine bottle over a man’s head and then, while he was still staggering from the force of the blow, gouge one of his eyes out with the shattered neck. Or, if they fell quickly, to stomp out their teeth with one of his heavy steel-toed boots. Monk’s handiwork could be viewed on almost any block in the vicinity of the New Irving. “It don’t hoit dem none,” he explained, “for they’s already half-dead when it happens. It only hoits later, when and if dey wakes up.” One thing you had to give Monk, though, was that he would never club a mab; oh, he might knock her down, but never in such a way that would mark her, for Monk had the respect for the ladies, he did, whether they deserved it or not, which in his milieu most of them didn’t.
Monk’s most recent exploit was the Battle of Rivington Street, in August 1903, the year after we arrived in New York, back when gangsters had names like Kid Jigger and Johnny Spanish, Nigger Ruhl, the Lobster Kid and Yakey Yake Brady. There had been trouble brewing between the Eastmans and Kelly’s Five Pointers for a long time, mostly over turf, which meant making money, and not, as was so often the case, over dames, which meant spending money.
As I look back on it, and note the confluence of days and dates, I suppose I would say that Rivington Street, and its aftermath in the Bronx, marked the end of old New York as most of the gangsters knew it, and the beginning of a new era, one that offered me the chance that I both seen and took. No matter that the boroughs had only recently been dragged into the municipal fold: the only part of town that mattered was Manhattan, and the part of Manhattan that mattered was still mostly south of 42nd Street. The subways were just getting started then, numbering the days of the els, and the days of the kind of mischief one could get into beneath them, in the city of shadows that belonged to the gangs.
I missed Rivington Street, but a number of the Gopher brethren happened to be passing by the intersection of Rivington and Allen, under the Second Avenue el, on that fateful day and of course Monk later told me all about it, and thus I’ve heard the tales pretty much straight from the various horse’s mouths or arses, as the case may be. There had been trouble brewing between the Eastmans and the Five Pointers for a couple of years, but this particular fight started when some Pointers decided to stick up one of Monk’s stuss games. Stuss was a card game, a variation of faro. Nobody plays faro anymore, but back then it was so popular that half its terms joined up with the English language, like keeping tabs, being a piker or a stool pigeon, breaking even, landing in hock, stringing somebody along, getting a square deal and so forth.
Faro was also a betting game, a kind of cross between blackjack, roulette and craps, in which the players laid wagers on which card or combination of cards would turn up as the dealer dealt them two at a time and placed them on a big layout. It was supposed to be fair, with the house having only a slight advantage over the players, except that it wasn’t the way they played it in the brace houses down around the Bowery. There was different versions of faro, like skin faro, short faro and rolling faro, but east of the Bowery the one most people played was stuss, or Jewish faro, which was a simplified version that gave the bank a huge advantage, and of course the stuss games were often fixed too, which gave the bank an even bigger advantage. There’s nothing as sure as a sure thing, which is the only kind of thing to wager on.
On the night in question, this particular stuss game was taking place under the arch of the el when some Eastmans and some Pointers got into it and gats got drawn and all of a sudden a full-scale donnybrook was under way. The boys was blasting away at each other, and soon others came running, and before you knew it there was more than a hundred gangsters mixing it up, including some Gophers who just happened to be passing by and decided to join in the fun. Which continued until the cops showed up, firing, and three guys was killed and a bunch was arrested, including Monk, who gave his name as Joseph Morris and was released the next day, as usual.
The boys from Tammany decided they’d had enough and so they forced both sides to smoke the peace pipe, although everyone agreed that the Eastmans had gotten the better of it, and I think that must have rankled Kelly, who for all his book learning and his airs was after all a hot-blooded Italian and just how hot his blood was we would all discover soon enough.
What the politicians said was this fighting stuff was bad for business and, worse, it was bad for politics. The damn reformers, Republicans mostly, was always holding up the gangs as an example of all that was wrong with New York in general and Tammany in particular, and truth to tell they had a point, for in them days the politicians owned the gangs lock, stock and barrel, which meant there wasn’t a hell of a lot of difference between the goose and gander. Meanwhile, the newspapers were sounding the alarm about crime in the streets and how the young folks in the rum wards was nothing but affectless animals who’d kill a man for three cents, then buy a glass of whiskey. So Tom Foley, a Tammany man to his toenails and the fella that they always sent when a diplomatic hand was needed, got into the act and personally made the peace between Monk and Kelly at a dive called the Palm Cafe.
But in this lull between two storms, as it were, I had Monk all to myself, and I put it to good advantage. The man had a positive genius for avoiding arrest, which was due to his Tammany connections, for Monk was an extremely useful field commander in the Tammany Tiger’s ongoing wars against the toffs and swells, because who was less swell than Monk? This of course was how he managed to get McDougal to give me the air on just his say-so, which was Tammany big shots like Tim Sullivan’s and George Washington Plunkitt’s say-so as well. It was the gangster Monk Eastman who introduced me to politics and right from the start I knew which group I preferred.
Monk’s minions were among the most effective sluggers—shtarkers, Monk called them in his Hebrew way—the Tiger had, and nobody could take out a pesky poll watcher like Monk; he regulated Tammany elections on the East Side like Theodore Thomas waving his wand in front of an orchestra. There wasn’t hardly a soul who would admit to even thinking about voting the wrong way when Monk and his boys showed up,
and them that did succumb to error soon found themselves sleeping it off under a park bench somewhere.
“Ya needs guys wit’ whiskers,” Monk explained to me one afternoon. “Them’s da guys what you vote t’ree or four times and nobody da wiser.” You could always tell when an election was coming up, because beards sprouted like weeds in sandlots. Men with beards were ideal Tammany voters, because you could vote them once, then shave off part of their whiskers and vote them again, and then shave off everything but the mustache and vote ’em again, and finally shave them clean and vote them once more and there you had it, four votes for the price of one. After which everybody repaired to one of Monk’s blind pigs or tigers because defending democracy is thirsty work.
I don’t want you to get the notion that during my apprenticeship I was neglecting my duties on the home front. I reported in to Tenth Avenue most every night, and when Ma went off to work each day, I was always sober enough to assure her that I would be in school later that day. The way I had worked out the school problem was by simply having a couple of Monk’s lieutenants named Kid Twist and Richie Fitzpatrick show up there one day and explain to the padre in charge that young Master Madden would henceforth be pursuing his studies informally across town, and that all concerned would be very grateful if the school might carry me as active on its rolls, from time to time indicating the exemplary nature of my attendance, academic achievement and so forth, in exchange for which a certain personage of import was prepared to offer financial emoluments to the parish, which I do believe came from some of Kelly’s stuss games that Monk’s gang held up, which meant that the poor Jews were indirectly supporting the poor Catholics, at least in my case.
God love her, May would always cover for me, even if she frowned at sleeping until almost noon or even one in the P.M. each day and then leisurely rising and going about my ablutions as best one could in our flat. I kept Marty in line by virtue of my standing in the gang, so that he never dared squeal on me. By the time she got home each night Ma would be too tired to inquire how our days had gone and even if on the off chance she had been alert, I was hardly ever there anyway, so my activities were pretty much a mystery to her, although she must have deep in her heart known, because mothers are rarely as dumb as they pretend to be.
And All the Saints Page 6