Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  He didn’t wait for my answer. “I still think that way sometimes,” he said. “Whenever I need to figure out some guy I’m dealing with, what I do is imagine the way he was when he was five years old, say, or eight or nine. I imagine that—I send the guy back in time to what he was like hanging around some small apartment, and what his face looked like when he watched his mother and father speaking to him, what he felt, and when I do that it helps me to know how to act. I saw it all overseas too—saw it proved—when guys were dying, when they came back in on stretchers, when the shit was running down their legs. Because the two words that came out were always the same: ‘God’ or ‘Momma.’ Momma most of all. Please Momma, save me. Please Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Please.” He glanced at me. “It’s a good thing to remember, Davey—no matter who somebody is, no matter how rich and powerful, that once upon a time they were just little boys who weighed maybe forty or fifty pounds and who wanted their mothers to smile at them and to hold them.” He shrugged. “Though I have to admit that in my business I’ve come across a few characters, through the years, who might be different.”

  He laughed, as if he’d told himself a joke. “Oh yeah, Davey, I have come across a few who might not be like the rest of us. Pretty scary. To look in a guy’s eyes and feel he could just as easily never have had a mother or father. Turkish Sammy is that way. It makes him useful to me for the work he might be called on to perform one day soon.” Abe clicked his teeth together, lightly. Was Abe taking me to Mr. Rothenberg because they were expecting trouble from Fasalino? The word around the neighborhood was that the Italians had not had anything to do with the basketball fixes—Italians don’t love sports the way you crazy Jews do, Tony said to me—but that men like Abe and Mr. Rothenberg and Harry Gross were trying to finger them for it with the D.A. Why? “Anyway,” Abe went on, “Momma dreamt of being an actress—that’s the story I started out to tell you—but in those days for a Jewish girl to be an actress was like her wanting to be a prostitute. I never got the whole story straight, but the best I could figure was that in Odessa he made some kind of deal with her father to marry her so that she wouldn’t run away and join a traveling show. Crazy, huh? To try to imagine all that. Her father managed forests for a rich Gentile, and she was his youngest daughter, his favorite—they had eleven altogether, and three more who died young—and from the time she was born, when her old man was in his sixties, everyone doted on her for her beauty. Her father made out okay for himself, managing the land, and he had a good business going on the side, selling liquor to the peasants who lived there. And sometimes he’d go around banging on trees with a hammer.

  “Jesus! I hadn’t remembered that for a long time! That was the story she’d tell us about going around with him when she was a girl, and do you know why he banged on trees? Because the violin-makers would come to the forests to pick out trees for their instruments, and he had the knack of knowing which ones would be best just from banging on them with hammers and putting his ear to the bark and listening to them vibrate. Sure. She told me and Evie lots of stories about her father, about all the things he could do—how he played the fiddle and sang like an opera star and rode a horse like a Cossack and danced like a prince and how all the women followed him around and left letters for him in tree trunks. Her own mother died when she was eight and he never married again, and she met Poppa when she was fourteen years old and married him two months later. So what chance did she ever have? Can you tell me that?

  “All he really was, see, was a small-time gangster who supplied her father with some of the liquor he needed and who also went into the forests to get furs from the peasants. Which wasn’t legal either. You ask your mother for details—she’s closer to him than I ever used to be. She made her choice too, right? The two of them probably liked each other and went to the same whore houses together, for all I know. Sure. They were the kind of men I always classify as the ones who are born wanting to be big shots. That’s the way it is, if you ask me—that some men are born wanting more than anything to grow up so that everybody else in the world thinks they’re important. It’s what drives them, right? So Momma tried to run off one last time, and when they dragged her back, the story is that she was shouting out words in the street—from Uncle Vanya, that she’d been secretly memorizing—and she didn’t make it out of Odessa and Poppa offered to marry her to keep her from such a life and her father agreed and it happened. Okay?

  “And then they came to America. He took a lot of money off the old man from what I can figure. The old man adored her—who wouldn’t?—and he wanted most of all to protect her from harm. He figured Poppa was the guy for the job and in some ways he wasn’t all wrong. Poppa spent his life protecting her from harm, and from everything else too, pretty much. There were a lot of gangsters in Odessa then, and Poppa came to the old man one day after they were married and said he was in bad trouble with a guy who was bigger than either of them, that they’d caught him in some kind of double-cross having to do with the liquor—the old man could pay them off and they wouldn’t touch him, but that if Poppa didn’t leave they would kill him and my mother. The old man believed him, and who knows, maybe he was even telling the truth. All I know is they got on a ship and came to America, and Poppa picked up right where he left off.

  “Most of the coats he sold, see, were stolen goods. At night I’d watch him at work—he didn’t seem to mind—removing labels from coats and putting his own labels in, or dyeing the skins, or bleaching them, or feathering in new colors with a turkey feather, or pointing the pelts by adding hairs, or changing the styles completely so the owners would never recognize them—making them longer or shorter, or putting more padding in the shoulders, or taking out padding, or changing the collars or the sleeves or the linings. On the mink and the sable and the marten and lynx and most of the stuff he dealt in, the pelts were so tiny, and you needed so many of them to make a coat, and the insides were hidden with silk and taffeta and satin, that nobody knew how to trace the stuff once he’d worked it over. He’d take mink coats and slash the pelts into narrow diagonal strips and resew them into longer shapes, into what they called let-out mink in those days. And sometimes, if he got worried, he’d just ship the stuff out of town—he took less money that way, but it was safer. An artist, Momma called him, and she’d sit next to him for hours, him passing her furs, her stitching or brushing or feathering, or putting the furs on horsehide cushions and tapping them with little canes to soften them up, and her telling us that no matter how long she lived or how many times he showed her what he did, she would never have his gift.

  “He had a good racket, all right, and after a while he didn’t even wait for the coats to come in but just gave guys addresses of his clients. Sometimes he’d sell the same coat, in different incarnations, three or four times over, even sell the same skins back to the original owner. That gave him his biggest charge. When a coat would come back a third or fourth time he would stroke it and put it over his forearm and say that this was the true cat with nine lives.

  “He played around with the women here too. If he got the itch, at nine in the morning even—I could always tell by how he would drink his coffee more quickly, by how much time he spent in front of the mirror, and by how, if Momma tried to touch him, to give him affection, he’d get angry with her—but if he needed it, he’d say he was going off to see a client for a few hours, and when he’d come back later he’d stink of wine and perfume and cigar smoke, and then Momma would stand up to him and they’d go at each other for a while. Once she threw boiling water at him, but it missed his face and only did in one of his shirts and scalded his arm some. Another time she got her nails into his cheeks and I felt pretty good about that. But he was too strong for her mostly and whatever it was he had, she seemed to want it too much.

  “Sometimes I used to think that maybe he only felt important and loved her when he saw the way other people looked at her. Some things aren’t worth much to people until somebody else wants it, I guess, because what happene
d was this: Momma finally fell in love with this little Irish guy who came to the store all the time delivering the stolen coats to Poppa. His name was Dennis Mooney, and Poppa used to make jokes about him because that was what he’d do all the time around Momma—he’d moon around and try to steal glances at her.

  “He looked like a little jockey, or a prizefighter, only too pretty—a short, wiry guy with a shock of strawberry blond hair, fair skin and a broken nose that made him handsomer than he would have been without it—and he was no more than twenty-one or twenty-two. Momma was almost forty by then. I was nineteen, a little younger than Dennis, and Evie was twenty and working uptown as a secretary for a shirt company, where Poppa got her the job, so we weren’t home as much as we used to be. I hung around with guys from the neighborhood who liked to live it up—the other Jews cursed us and prayed we wouldn’t cast eyes on their daughters, right?—and their daughters spent most of their time dreaming about when we would. I liked the high life then, Davey. I liked skirts. I liked fancy clothes and fancy women. I made my money by working for Poppa’s friends—driving trucks and picking up stuff and running things here and there. Prohibition was over, but there was still a lot of stuff, out of bond, that needed trafficking and nobody got hurt most of the time. Did I think of doing anything else with my life? Who knows? Momma thought I should go to some kind of school, to get something safe, but I never did well in school, even though the teachers said I had the brains. I always watched the skirts too much. I liked to get bashed on good bourbon and roll around in silk sheets and wake up the next morning and have my buddies brag to me about the crazy things I did. I had a reputation.

  “Anyway, while I was dipping my stick uptown, Dennis was having a good time with Momma downtown, only we didn’t know about it for a while. It turned out he wanted to be an actor and singer in vaudeville, see, and he’d get down on one knee, with Momma sitting on a chair, her hands in her lap, and he’d sing these Irish songs for her, like John McCormack, and come with scripts in his coat pocket and they’d act out the parts together and Poppa thought it was all a gas. He even had Dennis come around once or twice for his clients, and he dressed him up in a tuxedo and had him sing for them while they sipped tea. It was crazy, believe me.

  “Until he caught them at it one day when he got home, before he was supposed to—Evie and I weren’t there either—and he beat the guy up so bad that no woman would ever want to kiss him again, he told Momma. Afterwards he took his knives, from working on the furs—the ones he used for making let-out minks—and said that next time he’d use them on the guy’s pretty face. The cops came, but Poppa had them pretty much in his pocket and they just took Dennis away to get him stitched up, and for a day or two—except for the effect on Momma—I guess we figured that was the end of it. She’d had her fling. She was heartbroken. My own idea was that she’d gotten even with him in her way, even though he caught her. Did she want him to catch her? Did she want him to know after all those years that she could still experience love, that she could still give herself to someone else the way she’d first given herself to him?

  “He tried to cover up the way he felt by bragging to everybody about the job he did on Dennis, but he didn’t fool me, and when he wasn’t around I gave a lot of attention to Momma, not pushing her, but encouraging her, telling her that I could set her up in her own place, that I’d even get her together with Dennis if that was what she wanted. What did I care that she was twice his age? I never minded if things worked out crazy in this life, Davey, if the combinations went against the odds, because who ever said anything good followed the rules? Sometimes, I guess, I even figured the stranger and crazier the combination, the more likely it could make you happy. But Momma didn’t want to hear me. She just sat around crying a lot and not making a move to do anything else.

  “It mixed your mother up pretty good too. She always had a thing for Poppa, and now he went to town on her. He got her a bunch of new clothes, gave her one of his silver fox coats—a gorgeous smokey-blue one that was worth a small fortune—and took her out to restaurants a lot, giving her a sob story about how much he loved Momma, about how he’d never get over the hurt she did to him, about how he was going to change, and she lapped it up. Well. She wasn’t so unlike her brother, was she? I mean, she liked the fancy clothes and I guess she liked pants the way I liked skirts.

  “She and I didn’t talk much then—she was ashamed of me too, I guess, because the old man made her think I was involved with Dennis, that I’d fixed the whole thing up to start with. I couldn’t get through most of what was going on, to figure out what he said to her that I had to make up stories to cover, but the real truth is that there wasn’t time either, because a guy I drove for, a fat Irishman named Dunn who took a shine to me, took me aside a few days later and told me that Mooney was the nephew of a big shot named O’Shea, who was Dunn’s boss, and that O’Shea had hired some guys to take care of Poppa.

  “‘Good,’ I said. ‘It’ll save me the trouble.’ Then—would you believe it?—this big guy put his hand on his heart and got tears in his eyes and told me they were going to get Momma, that O’Shea heard how beautiful she was and decided to teach Dennis a lesson too. O’Shea said that if Momma wasn’t beautiful anymore, then she would never give any man trouble again, so he hired a guy to throw acid in Momma’s face.

  “That was the main story, then and now, and I didn’t waste time. I went straight to Rothenberg and almost got myself killed barging in on him where he lived with all his bodyguards, but I’ll get to the crucial part, which is that when he heard about what was going to happen—he’d bought coats for himself and his wife from us—he didn’t hesitate. ‘I like you and your mother very much, Abe,’ he said, ‘and I will see to it that such an atrocity does not take place.’ That was all he said at first, except that he could see how shaken I was. So he put his arm around me and took me into his sitting room—he lived near where Belmont’s mansion used to be then, on Fifth Avenue and 18th Street—and he asked me if I realized exactly what I was doing by putting myself in his debt. He was pleased to do me a favor, and—it might never happen, but I should be prepared—he might need to call upon me to return the favor one day. I said I understood.

  “How can I explain it all to you, Davey? If Dennis hadn’t hung around Momma, maybe I’d have a different life today, but he did and what happened happened, and here I am. I try never to think of the life I don’t have, right? Mr. Rothenberg and I talked a long time that afternoon and we discovered that we liked each other, that we thought the same way about most things. He asked me why I free-lanced so much for the Irish and the Italians and some of the Jews who ran our section—Shapiro and Ribalow mostly—and would I consider becoming associated with him at some future date. I said I’d consider it but that I wasn’t eager, and he liked that—that I deferred things, that I didn’t jump at his invitation.

  “Nothing happened to Momma. Two of O’Shea’s men met with a bad accident in the East River, though. I didn’t hear from Mr. Rothenberg for eight months, and then I got a message one day that he wanted to see me. I went. He asked me if I owned a gun. I said I didn’t. He gave me a Smith and Wesson .38 and instructed me in its use. He explained very carefully how he worked and why, how he tried never to use force unless he had to because he believed that no matter how many guns you had someone would always come along with more guns and bigger guns, and how force itself didn’t create power or influence.

  “Could you beat everybody up? Could you kill them all? There was always somebody who could come along who was stronger. What you had to do was to be able to offer people something they couldn’t get anywhere else. The brain that knew how not to use guns or force or threats, the brain that had a talent for persuasion, for organization—that, he said, was the most powerful weapon a man possessed. That and the imagination to think of possibilities others hadn’t thought of yet. Mr. Rothenberg was big on imagination. He himself had been blessed with the brain and the imagination, he said, and he sensed th
at I had also. Alas, though, neither of us were named Rockefeller or Harriman or Vanderbilt or Morgan. We weren’t rich German Jews like Rothschild or Belmont or Lehman. We couldn’t count on the police or the Army or the politicians to advance or protect our business interests the way they could.

  “He talked for a long time that day and in all the years since he never repeated what he said to me then. He was a very intelligent man—not what he is today, what’s left of him—and if he hadn’t been born the way he was, and a Jew, he could have gone to the top of anything, in business or government. He was mostly into gambling then, into the numbers and the horses. He had this little guy named Abbadabba Berman working for him—The Human Adding Machine, we called him—and he kept him in a back room with lots of paper, pencils, and gumdrops. Berman would go through the thousands of policy slips the runners brought in and by the time the first seven races were run he’d figure out the number on which the most money had been bet, the one they couldn’t let win. Then Mr. Rothenberg would relay the information to a guy at the track where we were taking our daily number from, and the guy would make whatever adjustment was needed in the pari-mutuel handle.

  Abe laughed. “I hadn’t thought of him for a long time—Berman. I loved that guy. Did your father ever tell you about him?”

  “No.”

  “He died young—younger than your father. Rothenberg kept him in this bare room where he was all scrunched over, wearing a hat, a bunch of pencils in his left hand like a quiver of arrows. Lepke had him killed a few years later, when Abbadabba had gone to work for Dutch Schultz. They shot him in the bathroom of the Palace Chop House in Newark while he was on the pot.