Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground

by Steve Stern

  With his mouth running in its fluent patter, he took what looked to me to be dangerous liberties, hailing these rough customers by name. “Hello Hardface. Shithouse, how do, y’all still on the ruination train? 01 Nine Tongue here be drinkin that ugly milk, fo long his head turn to a biscuit. What say Mastah Ajax, which his mama she be teachin me to lawdy-lawd. An they’s Race Riot hissef, what I’m hear got him a sissy man…”

  From the depths of his fathomless pockets, he would draw forth the ribbon-bound envelopes that the men sniffed discerningly. Then they appointed the scholar among them to read aloud, for the edification of all, the sometimes amorous, sometimes petulant (often vengefully poison-pen) billets-doux from the ladies of the Baby Doll Hotel. After that the scholar, turned scribe, would draft a dictated reply, naming rendezvous and such. This was dutifully scrolled and handed back to Lucifer along with his gratuity. Sometimes there were tokens exchanged in the transaction—say, a lady’s frilly nothing for a gentleman’s solidgold something—which Lucifer might fetch from and return to an office annex under his brother’s headrag. Occasionally the tidings were not so welcome: subpoenas and court summonses for those who used the Baby Doll as their mailing address. Then I noticed that the wise guy’s tip wasn’t so readily forthcoming.

  Sometimes Lucifer carried their markers. These were items toward which the gamblers, usually seated in front of a depleted stack of chips, would profess a deep sentimental attachment. They were rabbit’s feet, cat’s-eyes, souvenir bullets dug out of old gunshot wounds—apparently anything would do. One character at a rummy table offered the lesser half of a wishbone; another yanked a dogtooth out of his grimacing head, spitting gobs of blood onto the floor. Then the markers were dutifully carried to fat men eating ribs in airless back rooms. (Rooms even farther back than the back rooms were where the gambling took place.) The fat men would in turn, and according to the reputation of the man who’d sent the token, either grumble, spit, or flick ashes, which meant to get lost. Or else they would hand over a wad of grease-stained bills.

  That’s how it was that I got to see the Monarch Club of evil repute. “This a bad luck house where the boss man get put on the spot bout oncet a week,” Lucifer had informed me, making a revolver out of his forefinger and thumb. “Putty soon ain’t nobody be boss less they dead already, livin mens need not apply. See that skillethead over by the do?” He pointed toward an obsidian gorilla in a double-breasted suit. “Tha’s Big Six the take-off man, like to mess with folks’ bones an he ain’t no doctah. So ugly he hurt yo feelins, now don’t he?”

  If he was trying to scare me, then all right, I was scared. What else was new? But I was also glad that he’d begun to take the time to talk to me. I was glad that he remembered I’d come along, even if it was only to remind me of the terrible, sinister places we were in. Besides, had I decided to break and run—which I confess that I was once or twice inclined to do—I would have been on my own again. And the thought of facing the street all alone, now that I’d gotten used to the cover of their company, made me stick even closer to the twins.

  When he realized that I wasn’t going anywhere, Lucifer eventually began to drop the scare tactics. Then he was anxious, in his proprietary manner, that I shouldn’t overlook the classier features of a nightclub’s decor. “Ain’t nothin can compare this side a King Keedoozle commode!” he’d boasted as we entered the Club Panama, waving a hand that took in brass rails and leather banquettes, a fairy ring of lights around the dance floor. There was a raised bandstand where the soloist for the Rhythm Hounds, a lady horn player in a gown like an aluminum rain barrel, had been brought to her knees by her own shrill signature. People at the tables jerked and squirmed as if the music were running loose in their clothes. They hallelujahed as the lady unbent her high note and allowed it to dissolve in the air. Then it seemed that the music had vaporized into the lavender smoke that hung over the green gaming tables at the rear of the room.

  As the night wore on, Lucifer became ever more expansive, as if he’d made a decision that nothing should be lost on me. The sights that had been previously supposed to inspire fear now seemed to serve only for my enlightenment. In Pee Wee’s Saloon, bobbing his head in time, he called my attention to an upright piano: “This what you call the hesitashum beat, an tha’s the very bar it own self where Mistah Handy done first writ down the blues”—indicating it the way my grandfather might have pointed toward Sinai.

  On top of the bar, in the absence of Mr. Handy, a kiss-curled tootsie was lifting her dress to bang together cymbal-clad knees. A dusty crowd was milling about in the acid yellow light, some dancing a slow drag near the piano, others clustered around the bumpered crap tables. These tables, as Lucifer (like a flea in my ear) divulged confidentially, could be converted to billiards the second that the cops arrived. By the same token, the roulette wheel became a clock on the wall, and the lottery barrel a canary cage. In fact, the whole place was fraught with contrivances that instantly transformed the furniture from its felonious purposes back again to innocence. Which was maybe why Pee Wee’s was also known as the Garden of Eden.

  There was a portrait on the wall of a giant Negro with a head like a polished plum, straddling an angry ocean in which a ship was going down. Again Lucifer: “Tha’s Jack Johnson was worl champeen, which the XX Titanic have refuse to carry him on board.” Beneath the painting was a bench where a group of old men, several of them amputees, were holding guitars and beat-up cornets like badges of office. These, I was told, were the emeritus musicians whose years on the road had cost them literally an arm and a leg. But as Lucifer assured me: “It don’t take but three fanger to play the blues Delta-style.”

  Here I would have liked to toss in a tidbit of my own, just to show I wasn’t so dumbstruck as some. Unlike the tagalong brother Michael, for instance, I had a mouth. I tried to tell the wise guy that in my own neighborhood there was also a bench. There the old kockers sat in front of another tonsorial parlor, missing digits that the Cossacks had relieved them of long years ago. But before I could finish my footnote, Lucifer was in motion again.

  Even on the street he made every minute count. Brazenly he collared members of the colored baseball league strutting in their red-socked uniforms, their cleats on the sidewalk like munching teeth. He stopped the roustabouts and country boys stumbling out of juke joints, pie-eyed from too much temptation. He hooked thumbs in the bibs of their overalls and stood on tiptoe to whisper in their ears. Then they would lick their lips, their eyes waxing banjo, and turn over whatever they had in their pockets. Like sheep they would follow Lucifer and Michael (and Harry!) around the corner and through the portals of the Baby Doll Hotel.

  As the designated envoys of their redoubtable Aunt Honey, the wards of the Baby Doll had carte blanche everywhere. And Lucifer, he was a regular Pied Piper of Beale Street. Running with him, I began to feel almost indestructible, like when someone touches the Baal Shem’s robe in a holy story. So long as you hung on tight, you could go anywhere; you could travel out of time to paradise. Or you could plunge into the thick of some dank and flyblown hole-in-the-wall, where Lucifer would shout “Western Union!” or any of a dozen variations on “Open, Sesame” to clear the way.

  Then we would nudge and shove through an overheated press of stump drinkers, of dancers shaking in the throes of the shimmy-she-wobble. (I was beginning to pick up the lingo.) We crossed floors so sticky with tobacco juice, bellywash, and blood, for all I knew, that they squished like a swamp under the soles of your shoes. I heard hysterical laughter and language that could have wilted flowers. I saw cryptic high signs and tempers at the end of short fuses, a man in a corner fingering the outline of the pistol in his pocket, a woman on a table skirt-dancing herself into a stupor. I saw rose-colored lights illuminating the cavern of a crooner’s mouth, his uvula vibrating like the devil’s own speed bag. I saw the lights playing off sweat-spangled shoulders and cheeks, saw them flash from a drawn knife blade. In short, I kibbitzed to my heart’s content a life that wa
s never meant for my eyes. A life that waited until gentlefolk were safely tucked in their beds before coming out to play.

  If anybody looked askance at me or aimed some barbed remark my way, I never noticed. In league with Lucifer, I’d begun to take it for granted that I shared his immunity. Not only did I feel unthreatened, but I’d begun to assume that my presence was as naturally accepted (or ignored) as the twins’. That’s why I missed my stride when a gambler in one of the dives, his splayed nose spread like a sand dollar over his face, brusquely called me to his table.

  “Hey white folks,” he’d tipped back his chair to ask me, “y’all mind do I rub yo hade for good luck?” After I’d obliged and he’d frowned his dissatisfaction with my hair, that it lacked the fine texture he’d been led to expect from my race, I froze. I groped for an excuse. But before my backbone could turn entirely to jelly, Lucifer was there beside me to set him straight.

  “He ain’t white,” he was sorry to have to inform the gambler. “He Jewrish.”

  Seven

  After that first night I began to sneak out of the apartment two, sometimes three nights a week. Sometimes I stayed out till the small hours, coming home even later than my father, whose shop was often the last on Beale Street to close. On such nights I would only have time to catch a couple of winks before getting up for school. My teachers—imposing women in durable tweeds, formidable of bosom and tush, “bout six months in front and nine months behind” as Lucifer might have said—were large on discipline. They were ever vigilant, quick to resort to thumping with thimbles and hacking with rulers, to confining you to the purgatorial depths of the broom closet. Nevertheless, though they caught me catnapping with some regularity in my classes, they tended to let it go. I took this as a measure of just how inconsiderable I was in their eyes. Also, while my years in books had marked me for a social nobody among my classmates, they had given me a knack for making tolerable grades. So if my teachers thought anything about me at all, it was probably that I’d been burning the midnight oil.

  As for my family, they had their own affairs to attend to. Out of sight, it was safe to assume, I was out of their minds. That they might be out of their minds was another subject, though even the casual observer couldn’t help noticing that the Kaplan household seemed to have entered a state of decline.

  More cantankerous than ever, Grandpa Isador had stepped up his campaign of waylaying homeless yokels in Market Square Park. To their greater confusion he regaled them about the false messiah of Germany and his latest crimes against the Jews. Recent evidence had revealed that they were being dispatched by the boatload for ports that everywhere denied them entry; the seas were littered with a second diaspora of wandering Jewish ships, condemned to sail for all eternity without hope of landfall. Meanwhile you’d have thought that my papa maybe subscribed to such wild disclosures, that he bought them the way he bought the bogus merchandise filling his shelves, because he dug himself ever deeper into the burrow of his shop.

  In her virtual abandonment my mama turned to the rock of Uncle Morris. It was to him she petitioned for help in her efforts to have old Isador put away. Of the various available bughouse institutions, she was leaning, for reasons of convenience and economy, toward the Western State Asylum at Bolivar. This was a place where, according to my father, the inmates were frequently murdered, after first being made to sign over their earthly holdings to the asylum. The dead were then ground into meal and force-fed to the living, chained to their racklike beds—or so it was rumored. My uncle, whose blowsy waistcoat and roving smokestack cigar were now fixtures around the apartment, assured Mama that he was checking out the possibilities. And lately, cruising around in the afternoons in his cucumber-green touring car, my mama and Uncle Morris had begun to check out the possibilities together.

  In the midst of all this I was as happily neglected as Grandma Zippe behind the chicken-wire cage. With the habit of making lists that I owed to my apprenticeship at Kaplan’s, I took an inventory. Item: my family had certain notable screws loose, which who could deny. Item: the streets were awash with a multitude of ghostly strangers, among whom my grandfather conducted a tireless search for righteous men. Item: on top of which, the city had run riot with growing things—blue morning glories, yellow japonica, pink dogwood, wisteria seeping like purple sap from anything standing still. Was it any wonder that with so much going on in the way of distraction, nobody noticed that Harry Kaplan had begun to lead a double life?

  If Papa no longer seemed to remember why he’d invited me to come and work in his shop, then I could forget just as easily. What’s more, I’d become impatient with my papa’s indifference to what were clearly disreputable goings-on. What else could you conclude when you saw Oboy repeatedly give up his post to confer with questionable characters on the street? Characters with eyes that ticked like windshield wipers and black sandpaper jaws, whom I’d heard him direct to the loading dock in back. While I couldn’t quite believe that my papa was in cahoots with the puller, neither could I believe he was entirely innocent of what went on under his nose.

  Weaned from any lingering sense of duty to the pawnshop, I nevertheless continued to stick around. Write it down to force of habit, though the shop still remained a good vantage from which to keep your eye on the hijinks in the lagoon. There was also the matter of my weekly salary, which, even if it amounted to little more than carfare, was certainly better than nothing at all. In the meantime, though he didn’t ask and I didn’t offer my assistance in taking stock anymore, I was there if Papa needed to send me out on errands. I didn’t mind going if he didn’t mind my sometimes taking roundabout routes to get there; it was a way to kill time in the afternoons. And late at night, two, three, sometimes four nights a week, I escaped out my alcove window.

  I liked the secret disgrace of running with shvartzers, of having forbidden friends, if that’s what you want to call them. Of course I didn’t really include the dummy Michael, who’d been thrown into the bargain, like it or not. Nor did I believe for an instant Lucifer’s ridiculous claim that his sullen shadow had a passion for reading books. Tell me another. With his hunched-over shoulders and his slouching gait, the slow shifting of his hooded eyes, Michael might have auditioned for Oboy’s understudy. But where the stationary puller was sometimes given to fits of bustling animation, Michael was always the same steady goon. He was his brother’s dim creature, good for nothing but following orders and keeping unobtrusively out of the way. And if Lucifer sometimes deferred to him, asking advice that was never given, this was only out of playfulness, the way you’d talk to a pet. Nor was I fooled by a brightness that occasionally invaded the dummy’s eye, like a light switched on and off in a deserted house.

  But that Lucifer, he was another story. For a while he’d continued to make out that our relationship was purely in the nature of a business arrangement. He’d been quick, for instance, to let me know when my forty-five cents’ worth of rubbernecking was all used up. Then it had been time to renegotiate. It was “Gimme a nickel an I takes you backstage at the Midnight Ramble. Nother nickel, it a get you a peek at the Vampin Baby dressin’ room. Sniff they hangin-up costume do you like.” But even though he persisted in addressing me by the formal “Mistah Harry,” somewhere along the line he dropped the pretense of free enterprise.

  It could have been that he was simply getting used to having me in tow, since what was one more straggler at his heels to Lucifer? Or it could have been that—somewhere between helping him hide a fugitive from the Parchman Farm and carrying orders from the bootlegger under Pee Wee’s Saloon—I’d passed muster. Whatever the case, the last time or two that I’d tried to compensate him for my tour of the underworld, the wise guy had taken offense. He’d swelled up like God forbid there should be a mercenary bone in his body. Then he’d relaxed into one of his sphinxier grins. “Maybe sometime y’all can return I an Michael the favor,” he suggested dreamily, as if he hadn’t quite decided what it should be.

  I’m the first to admit th
at, outside my acquaintance with the heroes of books, I’d had little enough experience in making friends. But while I had nothing to compare this with, I decided that what could it hurt if I considered myself and the colored kid to be pals.

  There came a night when Lucifer said that the famous Beale Street could get along without us for a spell. “What I’m have in mind are a change a scene,” he’d asserted, pausing in the middle of Fourth Street to lick his finger and test the wind. This was an interesting prospect. To tell the truth, I’d been feeling that I’d seen what there was to see between the honky-tonks and social clubs and fleabag hotels of the neighborhood. Now I was curious to learn just how far the wise guy’s sphere of influence extended.

  We “borried” (a word I had lately come to interpret pretty loosely) an unattended skiff and rowed across the lagoon to the mercantile end of the street. It was my first ferry ride with the twins since the night of our original encounter, and I took the occasion to reflect on all that had happened, how far I’d come from the confirmed bookworm of old. I guess you could say I was proud of myself, proud to the point of entertaining delusions: I was this white hunter returning from an exotic port with human trophies. It was a notion that gave me a secret thrill—that is, until we beached the skiff and I was suddenly beset by misgivings.

  After all, it was one thing to hobnob with Negroes on their own side of the fence; it was fine to play at being chums beyond the reach of prying eyes and all that. But it was quite another kettle of tsimmes to be caught in their company at my father’s end of Beale. You might even call it grounds for scandal. And here I was in full view of the pawnshops whose gossipy brokers knew me well.

  “Listen, Lucifer…” I was already starting to hedge as I climbed out of the boat, looking for some graceful way to take a powder. But the wise guy was ahead of me, as usual. He’d darted off, trailed by his brother, shagging it around a corner into the alley that ran behind the shops. When I caught up with them, he was lamenting to Michael, “I don’t b’lieve Mistah Harry think we knows how to be pre-cautious.” I was as grateful as I was ashamed.