What followed, unfortunately for the Jackson Arms Tenants’ Association, did provide a focus for the meeting, a vehicle which carried them off in an utterly wrong direction. Mike Birnbaum, energized by Myron’s failure to provide an answer to his question, was gearing up for another assault, when the outside bell rang. Sylvia jumped up to buzz her visitor in, then remembered that the outer lock was broken and there was no reason Mr. Rosenkrantz (if that’s who it was) couldn’t walk right up to her door. Nevertheless, she activated the buzzer designed to release the lock on the lobby door, then opened her own door to await their visitor.
“Al Rosenkrantz,” the fat man said, shaking Sylvia’s outstretched hand as he rushed past her. “Sorry to be late, folks.” He pulled off a tan London Fog trench coat and handed it to his hostess. “We had an emergency in the Bronx. Heatless building. I had to light a fire under the repair crew.” His small eyes, overshadowed by heavy brows and pinched by sallow, puffy cheeks, darted from person to person and he nodded whenever he made eye contact, absently running a finger along his thin, dark mustache.
“What about an emergency right here? I froze my butt off last night.” Mike Birnbaum was the first to find his voice.
“Please, call me Al,” Rosenkrantz began.
“I don’t call you nothin’ until I see results,” Birnbaum returned.
Sighing, Rosenkrantz positioned his fat body over a kitchen chair and sat heavily. “Please, everyone, call me Al,” he repeated, then spoke directly to Mike Birnbaum. “I don’t know who I’m speaking to…”
“A tenant,” Birnbaum answered, folding his arms tightly across his thin chest.
Rosenkrantz, looking sharply at the old man, couldn’t have asked for a better beginning. The senile bastard would make a perfect dupe. “Mrs. Kaufman,” he said, turning to Sylvia, “I agreed to come here tonight so that I could hear your complaints firsthand. As you know, Precision Management has been in charge of your building for less than three months. In that time, we’ve made some changes, but we feel that, in the long run, these changes will reflect the true needs of the owners and the tenants.”
“Is this why you are throwing us into the street?” Muhammad Assiz, his voice sweet as sherbert, interrupted Al Rosenkrantz’s set speech. “Since you have taken the buildings, only the Pakistani people have been evicted. Tell me why this is.”
Rosenkrantz smiled indulgently. “Please,” he said. “Your name. What should I call you.”
“Muhammad Assiz.”
“Muhammad, I’ve been in this business for fifteen years and I have never been involved in a deal this big where the new landlord didn’t check leases. The first thing any landlord wants to know is who is living in which unit and are they living there legally.”
“So he could get a rent increase,” Birnbaum snorted.
Al Rosenkrantz accepted a cup of coffee and sipped at it gently, before answering. “A lease,” he began in his most reverential tones, “is a profound legal document. A lease is a contract that defines the conditions of a binding, longterm relationship. The lease is so important to urban life, that New York City has created a special court, the Tenant-Landlord Court, to enforce the provisions of leases. I tell you a landlord has as much right to require that his tenants live within the lease, as the tenants have to demand the landlord honor the obligations specified in the lease.” He paused, deliberately seeking out Myron Gold who was staring at Mike Birnbaum as if at a cockroach on his kitchen table. When he got a nod from Gold, an acknowledgment of his irrefutable logic, he began again. “But these are all problems associated with a new relationship. Believe me, six months from now every one of the empty apartments will have been rerented. A new super—one who can stay sober long enough to fix those locks when the savages break them—will be in place. Everything will be returned to normal and you’ll be laughing at your suspicions. Look at the other buildings on the sidestreets. We’ve brought them through the transition without a hitch. Just give it a little time.”
Andre Almeyda, restraining his wife, spoke up first. “Mr. Rosenkrantz.”
“Please, call me Al.”
“No, Mr. Rosenkrantz. I am Cuban. Born in Cuba and I learn in Cuba that not everyone who shakes your hand is a friend. I want to know why you allow these whores to move into our building? I raise my little girls to believe in our Lord Jesus Christ and I don’t want them to see such things.”
“Good. I’m glad you brought that up.” Accepting a slice of cake from Sylvia Kaufman, he flashed her a quick smile. He could feel the sweat forming in the roots of his thick, black hair; it was the one thing he couldn’t control. He took a quick bite of the cake, savoring the tang of the lemon icing, before answering. “When I first heard of these alleged prostitutes, I went into the files and personally checked the lease on 1F. The unit is currently rented to a man named Sal Ragozzo. One of our field men paid a visit to 1F just last week and found Mr. Ragozzo in residence. According to the lease, we cannot evict just because the tenant has roommates. Now, if the police make an arrest and get a conviction, we can have them removed without a problem. That would be a clear violation of the morals clause in the lease. But without some proof, I believe we’d lose in Tenant-Landlord Court.” Quickly, with a little sigh of disgust, he wiped his forehead with a white handkerchief. “Still, as a demonstration of Precision Management’s good faith, if you can bring us a petition with…let’s say twenty names on it, we’ll serve Mr. Ragozzo with an eviction notice and see if he decides to fight. Meanwhile, I do feel that you should demand police help. Put some heat on these scum right away. One thing I personally guarantee, Precision Management will double-check the references of all new tenants. There will be no repeat of this unfortunate situation, which, I should add, was inherited by Precision Management. Apartment 1F was rented to Mr. Ragozzo by Morris Katz three weeks before the closing.”
Pat Sheehan watched Al Rosenkrantz’s performance with private amazement. Sylvia Kaufman’s assessment of Pat as gay was only partially accurate. Certainly, his roommate, Louis Persio, was a feminine homosexual, but if that’s all “gay” meant, Pat Sheehan would have rejected the label without a second thought. The couple had met while doing felony time in Dannemora State Prison. The homosexual unit happened to be full on the day Louis Persio arrived and the administration, with typical sensitivity, assigned him to the first available cell, which happened to belong to Pat Sheehan. What followed was a contract, every bit as sacrosanct as Precision Managements leases, in which Louis Persio agreed to satisfy Pat Sheehan’s pent-up sexual fantasies while Pat Sheehan guaranteed Persio’s physical and sexual survival in the institution. What followed that, after a year’s cohabitation, was only love, but it surprised the shit out of both of them. Especially Pat Sheehan, who found that even after their release, even after he’d spent a weekend in bed with an enthusiastic seventeen-year-old whore from the stable of an old jail buddy, he still wanted Louis Persio.
When a second and a third and a fourth visit did nothing to diminish the intensity of this need, Pat Sheehan, ever the realist, hopped the 7 Train out to Persio’s Jackson Heights apartment, a single suitcase dangling from his hand. That had been four years ago, two years before Louis had woken up one morning with badly swollen lymph glands and a fever that defied aspirin and ice packs.
Fortunately, nobody had ever caught wind of the roommates’ jail backgrounds. Being gay was enough trouble. Pat was short, only five foot seven, but weighed a solid hundred seventy-five pounds and was prison-hard. Louis Persio, by Dannemora standards, was a fox and foxes are not protected with bullshit. Pat, however, tried to avoid any display of his street sense; he passed his days driving a UPS delivery van, which was a very good job for an ex-con, and he didn’t want any complaints getting back to his Parole Officer, Juan Profantes. Profantes was overlooking Pat’s relationship with Louis Persio. For the time being.
But even if Pat Sheehan’s smarts had been repressed for a hundred years, he could still spot a bullshitter like Al Rosenkrantz
. The guy smelled like bullshit and Pat sniffed the odor like an old con probing for fear in a new prisoner. Pat had read the move when the pimp first showed up with the two women. Nobody could sign a lease with Rags Ragozzo without washing their hands immediately afterward. The guy sweated olive oil. Like fat Al Rosenkrantz with the drops starting to slide along his temples. Rosenkrantz was so obvious that Pat Sheehan was tempted to call him on it. To slap him with his bullshit. He could feel every warden he’d ever known speaking through Al Rosenkrantz’s lips. “If you give the institution a chance, the institution will work with you.” The lies made him want to vomit.
But Pat Sheehan held his peace. He didn’t tell his fellow tenants what (or who) was coming in behind the whores, though he’d made the new tenants in 4B, right across the hall from his own apartment, as heroin junkies the minute he’d found them struggling with their few pieces of cardboard furniture. Shit, he ought to know about dope. That’s why he went away. Because of an unfortunate accident in the middle of an armed robbery while trying to get the money to sustain his habit.
“A gonif you can’t recognize?” Mike Birnbaum shouted at Myron Gold. “You got to wait until he cracks your skull before you wake up?”
FIVE
February 20
JONATHAN “BORN” MILLER WAS, among other things (crack addict, mugger, prostitute, pimp), a vegetarian. At twenty-four years of age, and fresh from Rikers Island, he felt himself to be at peace with a world he finally understood. True, he was using crack again, but at nowhere near the suicidal pace that had preceded his incarceration. He had been crazy back then, crazy enough to smash the side window of a car waiting for a light at 39th and Ninth, just off the Lincoln Tunnel. He remembered reaching through the broken glass to grab the old broad sitting behind the wheel; he could still hear himself screaming at her for money like she was deaf. A poor helpless old vic in a pearl gray Mercedes-Benz, with cars in front of her and behind her. Where could she go?
Into her purse. Into her mother-fuckin’ purse for a can of mace. When she splashed that shit in his eyes, he stumbled back into the side of a moving delivery van and the mirror knocked him just flat enough for the police to arrive before he could crawl away. Who would believe such bad luck? Who could believe the mace after staying awake for three days and nothing to hold his head up? On top of which, the old cunt, instead of hauling ass like they always do, waits calmly for the pigs, then files a complaint.
The arresting officers (after they put a major beating on his ass) charged him with assault, assault with intent to kill, assault with a deadly weapon (the window glass), reckless endangerment (to the other drivers on Ninth Avenue), possession of a controlled substance, felony possession of a controlled substance, possession with intent to sell a controlled substance and paraphernalia. It was enough, considering the string of plea-bargained misdemeanors that had dominated his street life, to effectively put him away until his sixtieth birthday.
But the DA was sure to cut a deal in return for a guilty plea. All those charges were only there to frighten him into taking the wrong deal. That’s what the jailhouse lawyers, who listened to his case in return for the chicken cutlet sandwiches he smuggled out of the captains’ dining room, predicted. But he didn’t buy it. Fact is, he only turned to those bullshit artists because he never had a lawyer of his own. Never went to court, either. Or saw a cop or heard from anyone in law enforcement except for correction officers, who had less than no interest in his legal situation.
Six months later, his body strong from hundreds of hours in the gym, he had his act together, courtesy of an older inmate, Brian “DeadDog” Patterson, who had taught him (in exchange for certain reciprocal sexual favors) how to discipline his mind while he nourished his body by cleansing his system with fruits and vegetables. Only then, when he was pure in mind and body, when his act was tight and he was ready for the world, did he seek out a correction counselor and ask why his case hadn’t gone to trial. Three days later, after a chagrined Assistant DA named Myra Baines admitted to a phenomenally sarcastic Judge Calvin Smith that inmate Miller’s case had somehow been closed before his trial, Born Miller was out on the street.
Strong and confident, he wandered back to St. Nicholas Avenue, in Harlem, and begged twenty dollars from his mother. “I got to get me a place to stay, mama, else the man gon’ dump me back in the jail. I’m on probation.”
His mother, Maria, nodded maternally, then handed over the twenty because she was afraid of her son. She knew about his prior record, of course, both as a juvenile and as an adult, and she didn’t understand why they had let him out. She did, however, fully understand that twenty dollars would get rid of him, at least temporarily. At least long enough to make preparations for his return.
After six months of abstinence, the first hit on the pipe stem exploded simultaneously in his brain and his crotch. He was in a crack den/shooting gallery on 143rd Street and one of the women, a Dominican crack whore, offered to get him off for a hit on the pipe.
“Suck first, bitch,” he growled, careful not to betray how desperately horny he was. The girl, called Choch, turned the trick so fast and so efficiently, that Born Miller alternately fucked and smoked until the vials were empty. Then he went out to look for money.
At first he considered returning to his mother’s apartment, but now that she knew he was on the street, she’d either have her brother there or refuse to open the door. Born Miller wasn’t afraid of the brother, but he wanted crack and he wouldn’t get it there, no matter how many times he kicked ass. Better to take his chances in the street.
Ten minutes later, he was in a room on the second floor of an abandoned tenement near Convent Avenue, watching for prey, when three kids, teenagers, strolled by. The boys were fresh in their Task Force jackets, Guess jeans, and white Reeboks. One, the smallest, had a dope rope, a gold chain thicker than Miller’s thumb, hanging all the way down his chest. Man, did Born Miller want that fucker. That chain would keep him stoned for two weeks. Keep him stoned until he connected with DeadDog who was up in the Bronx somewhere.
The kids stopped to bullshit. Miller could see their lips moving, though he couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then a miracle happened. Two of the boys left, walking west toward Riverside Park, while the third, the one with the chain, already unzipping his fly, turned into a narrow alleyway alongside the tenement.
Born Miller’s spirits jumped almost as high as they would when he fired up the pipe again. The broken piece of cinderblock someone had chipped out of the window seemed to leap into his hand. The boy with the chain was right below him, as if waiting for the hand of God to descend, and Born, leaning out over the empty windowframe, let the cinderblock go like a World War Two bombardier over Berlin.
The stone seemed to drift downward, as gently as a parachutist dropping onto a spring meadow, but when it found the boy’s head, it made a very audible sound, a solid chunk, and the boy, still pissing away, dropped to the concrete and lay motionless as the blood ran down along the side of his face and pooled up under his head.
Born Miller took the chain to a pawnshop in Chinatown and sold it for a straight one hundred dollars per ounce. The pawn broker, a squinty-eyed ancient who peered at him from behind two-inch plexiglass, would get three times as much when he offered it at retail, but Miller didn’t mind. The fucking thing weighed more than twelve ounces and the cash made a satisfying pocket print when he slipped it into his worn Levis. Talk about fresh—he had enough to tighten his threads and still beam up for a week.
“Say what, my man,” he called to the Chinaman before walking back onto Bayard Street. “Could y’all direct me to a public phone. I have to make an important call.” The Oriental responded with a shower of high-pitched Chinese, but Miller wasn’t insulted. It’s hard, he speculated, to disrespect a man who’s about to get as high as he was. “Bye-bye, li’l Chinaman,” he called. “Don’ eat too many wontons.”
He found a phone on the corner which not only worked, but, even more mir
aculously, was not in use, and dialed DeadDog’s phone number.
“Speakin’,” the voice on the other end announced without preamble.
“That y’all, DeadDog?” Miller asked.
“Born Miller?”
“That’s my name. Dope is my game.” He tried to be cute. The man always liked him when he was cute.
“Homeboy,” DeadDog shouted. “Just the man I been waitin’ on. I got plans for you, baby. We openin’ up new territory and you gonna be the main man. You gon’ be mah banker.”
Born Miller, under DeadDog’s spell as if they were both still at Rikers, nodded as he took in the information. Most drug operations revolve around a banker who collects the money and a mule who hands out the dope, a structure which makes it hard to rip off both ends at the same time. DeadDog was in the midst of setting up a crack and smack distributorship in a quiet Queens neighborhood. “Virgin territory, y’unnerstand what I’m sayin’? No competition. We gon’ start workin’ out this apartment, but we be on the street in a month. Turn these white boys and these yellow boys on to some good crack and we have more customers than we can handle. Y’unnerstand what I’m sayin’? Y’all hold yo head together, you gon’ be one rich nigger.”
Born Miller dutifully memorized the address DeadDog gave him, but the minute he was off the phone, he headed straight up the Bowery to the Lower East Side, where every kind of drug was readily available. The first dealer he saw, part of a crew that worked Allen Street, sold him twenty vials of crack and a battered .44 caliber Charter Arms Bulldog for three hundred dollars, throwing in a dozen extra rounds as a sign of good faith.
The tool felt good tucked into his waistband. It made him feel bigger, an insurance policy to prevent some punk from lifting his roll the way he’d yanked the gold off that brother’s neck. He did have every intention of heading out to Queens, but he made the mistake of ducking into a doorway for a quick hit on the pipe and didn’t stop sucking on it for two days, when a sudden burst of paranoia warned him that if he didn’t move soon, DeadDog’s offer would, indeed, be dead.
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