New York Echoes

by Warren Adler

  The candy store was renowned for once being the headquarters of Murder Inc., the Jewish mob that was hired out to dispatch enemies of the mob bosses in the twenties and thirties, a number of whom wound up in the electric chair. When Max, Sporty, and the other boys got there, that era had ended, although the romance of the mob’s exploits remained to fire their imaginations.

  Most of the gang, like Max, were good boys who got decent marks in high school and dreamed of the prosperous life in the professions. Becoming a doctor, of course, was still the highest rung of the success ladder in that first-generation Brooklyn Jewish neighborhood and many became such, while others became lawyers and accountants, and the more idealistic of the crew became academics, writers, and artists.

  Sporty Morty would have none of that. He was a high school dropout and his life seemed obsessively devoted to his Casanova exploits. At times, he showed off his conquests to the candy store crowd, good-looking girls who wore their big boobs like flashing headlights and strutted and posed and swarmed over Sporty like ants over honey.

  There was nothing mean-minded about Sporty Morty. He was generous, gregarious, and loved the spotlight, performing mostly for the benefit of his envious crew. They coveted his lifestyle, especially his remarkable success with girls, a fact that he publicized at great length and with vivid images.

  “Keep this up and it will fall off,” was the mantra of his jealous buddies who yearned to drink the magic elixir of his success. As Max remembered, this was long before the sexual revolution, and getting girls to go all the way, for most of the crew, was a task akin to climbing Mount Everest barefoot. Not so for Sporty Morty.

  “I make them feel like Queen of the May,” he instructed us. “The name of the game is focus.”

  “But how?” his buddies asked.

  “I guess I was born with the knack.”

  At times, he would regale the crew with the results of a triple header, meaning having serial sessions with three different ladies in a single day, moving from bed to bed with the zeal of a grasshopper. The crew supposed, from the samples Sporty Morty brought around to exhibit, that they were all gorgeous with tits that would grow an erection on a dead Indian.

  Sometimes, goaded by our envy, he would illustrate the point of his prowess by visiting Bloomingdale’s and picking up the salesgirls. Apparently, this was his prime hunting ground. Max and his friends would watch out of the corner of their eyes as he pretended to buy something, and before they knew it he had stashed the girls’ telephone numbers in his little black book. He did have a little black book and sometimes showed us its jottings with numbers denoting not just a box score, but the quality of the girl’s sexual performance.

  The Bloomingdale’s spiel went something like this:

  “Hey doll, I couldn’t help noticing your striking resemblance to that movie star.”

  “Which one?” the girl countered, wary but strangely engaged.

  “The name escapes me, maybe Myrna Loy or Veronica Lake. Someone like that. I see the same aura.”

  “You’re kidding me,” the girl replied, skeptical for form’s sake, but visibly moved.

  “No really. There’s something about you.” He peered soulfully into the girl’s eyes. “I can’t put my finger on it.” He smiled and showed his dimple. “These things happen. Suddenly you’re there. I can’t explain it.”

  “Come on,” the girl said, blushing, but obviously enjoying the repartee.

  “Honest to God, I wish I could buy something, just to keep your attention. But by not making a purchase it will give me an excuse to see you again. That is, if you’d like me to?”

  “I can’t say I would mind,” the girl said.

  “Nor would I. In fact, if you could grant me your telephone number, I will show you my sincerity.”

  Invariably that first step was granted and thus the prelude was achieved. What was most remarkable was the yearning look the girls offered as Sporty Morty moved away. To the onlooking crew, her response was both baffling and miraculous.

  When Max or one or another of his friends tried to ape Sporty Morty’s technique they were rejected so resoundingly that it left them socially stunted for weeks on end. Sporty Morty’s talent was a given, like that of an artist. Was it in the smile, the look, the dimple, the walk, the clothes, the gleam? The words were, after all, so simple, silly transparent meaningless clichés full of false flattery that anyone with half a brain could decipher.

  Long debates would ensue on the mysterious subject of Sport Morty’s magnetism. All of the boys were certainly presentable, and a number of them were movie-star handsome, far more handsome than Sporty Morty, although one had to admit that Sporty had great teeth, a cleft chin, and dimples. His complexion, though, was often ashen, which the boys attributed to his overworked libido and a massive loss of semen.

  Looking back, Max calculated that Sporty Morty worship probably lasted no more than three or four years. Most of the boys went off to college and became the professionals their parents wished for them to be. Max Ruben became a certified public accountant, raised a family in Huntington, Long Island, had two sons, both of whom migrated to the west coast. When his wife died, Max moved to Manhattan to a one- bedroom apartment on the east side, ironically a couple of blocks from Bloomingdale’s.

  The old candy store gang drifted apart, and when Max would meet one or another of them casually invariably the conversation would get around to Sporty Morty.

  “What ever happened to Sporty Morty?” became the refrain of all these chance meetings. One or another heard he had moved to Manhattan where he became a full time bookmaker, a salesman for Vegas casinos or a pornographic film producer. No one knew for sure. Somehow Sporty had to be connected, at least in the mind of his old friends, as someone involved in illicit trade like gambling, jewel thievery or some other romantically roguish activity.

  Sporty Morty was always the central point of these chance meetings. For long periods of time, as life became crowded with other experiences, Max did not think about Sporty Morty. It was only when he became older, widowed, and lonely that memories of Sporty Morty surfaced like a long-latent storm that had been gathering for years.

  How did he do it? What was his secret? It became somewhat of an obsession for Max, especially now that he was alone. He wanted, needed, longed for the fleshly pleasures of ladies, preferably young ladies. His fantasies became lewd and, experimenting with the benefits of the new erection drugs, he discovered that he could maintain a respectable performance instrument despite his age.

  In his married life, sexual events had become gradually tepid and in the end ceased altogether. Desire had disappeared and although he had a wonderfully affectionate and loving relationship with his wife of more than fifty years, that part of the equation had lost its luster. Alone now, retired, with more time for reflection, he rediscovered erotic longing and began having exciting fantasies, stimulated by the numerous websites he had found on the Internet that could feed his newfound lust and bring him to a solitary climax. Naturally, he would much rather have reached consummation with a live partner.

  For some reason, he was not attracted to women of his own age. Their sagging flesh and aged bodies could not move him sexually. There were some forays in that direction, but in the end, they became brief and unsatisfying. What he found was that he longed for young flesh, pretty girls, the kind of girls that Sporty Morty brought around to the candy store in those halcyon days of his youth.

  As an accountant, he had a trained analytic mind, and a daily assessment in the mirror told him that he was hardly a magnet for any woman, no less a woman under thirty. Or even forty. In fact, with his graying, sparse hair, his yellowing teeth, baggy eyes, and growing jowls, he was hardly a sight to stir any woman, except those desperate enough to have somebody, anybody, a live male body, to shepherd them around.

  Somehow he managed to buy into the idea that age was merely a matter of attitude and that today’s eighty, a milestone he was fast approaching, was yesterday’
s forty. He became determined to remake himself into the youthful image of himself that had grown in his mind. He prevailed, over the objections of a reputable plastic surgeon, to tighten his face, remove his jowls, lift his chin, and eliminate the bags under his eyes. With liposuction he removed the fat on his belly and the love handles that had grown above his hips. He had his rotted yellow teeth replaced with white porcelain.

  He hired a trainer to help tone up what was left of his muscles, dyed his hair, tweezed his eyebrows, and, satisfied that he had done what he could for his body, bought a new wardrobe at Bergdorf’s favoring Italian designers. His sons, who passed through New York on their various business meetings, thought he had lost his mind or regressed into a severe form of senility. One of them suggested he see a psychiatrist. Privately, they both thought his makeover hideous.

  In his own mind, he felt that he had armored himself for the battle of the sexes, determined to pick up ladies by following the path of Sporty Morty Millstein. With the new erection pills, the cunning wisdom that came with age, and a pocketbook bulging with excess bucks, he felt he was ready to embark on a twilight career of seduction.

  Carrying the mind baggage of total recall of Sporty Morty’s chatting technique, he charged the Bloomingdale’s floor looking for a likely target. It wasn’t easy. The sales staff at Bloomingdale’s had changed radically since the days when Sporty Morty prowled its precincts. He remembered that Sporty Morty found his best prospects in the jewelry department and after careful study, he found a likely mark, a well-stacked blonde with a boyish haircut and a big-toothed, welcoming smile.

  “Hey doll,” he said, offering a flash of his implanted teeth and winking his bagless eyes. “I couldn’t help noticing your resemblance to that movie star.”

  “Really?” the girl said. “Like who?”

  “Marilyn Monroe comes to mind.”

  “My God, she’s been dead forever.”

  “I mean in her heyday,” he corrected, changing course. “I’m not kidding,” he said, forgetting his lines.

  “Can I show you some jewelry?” the girl said. “We work on straight commission.”

  “Honest to God,” he said, flashing his implants again, “but if I bought something now I wouldn’t have an excuse to see you again.”

  “Yes, you would. I would sell you something else.”

  “We should really discuss these things over dinner.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Dead serious,” he winked.

  “What, are you nuts, old man? I’m selling jewelry here. Why don’t you take your great grandchild to the carousel in Central Park and get out of my face.”

  Max felt words congeal in his throat. “Old man? Hell, this new me cost nearly fifty thousand dollars,” he wanted to say, but he held back. Sporty Morty would have known how to handle this situation. He felt himself flush and hurriedly left the store.

  Of course, he was mightily discouraged, although he did try the technique at Lord & Taylor and one time at Bergdorf’s, experiences that left him depressed and feeling ancient despite the cosmetic rearrangement of his face and the attempt to sculpt his body. He toyed with the advice one of his sons had given him about seeing a psychiatrist, but finally rejected it. He would not be able to bear the shame of revealing his inner life to a stranger.

  The repetitive rejections seemed to accelerate the aging process. He lost interest in living alone in his one-bedroom apartment. He stopped cooking for himself and took fewer and fewer pains with his grooming. Life slipped by without incident. He no longer experimented with erection drugs, no longer frequented the porn sites on the Internet, slept most of time, lost all interest in watching television, and generally drifted in a haze of nothingness.

  Finally his sons, seeing the condition of his apartment and his declining physical state, put him into a nursing home on East 71st Street. It was a compromise since at that point he refused to leave Manhattan. There, he languished, reluctantly joining the various programs devised to keep the inmates, as he called them, from dying of boredom.

  One day, sitting in the main room, dozing, his attention was arrested by a well-dressed elderly gentlemen sitting on a couch surrounded by three or four ladies of uncertain age, one of whom was in a wheelchair.

  The women were apparently mesmerized by the story he was telling and, despite their age, giggling coquettishly and hanging on his every word. The man was vaguely familiar, someone from long ago, etched now by age and infirmity but nevertheless displaying a familiar swagger that had crossed his path many years ago. Incongruously, he apparently had taken great care with his clothes and grooming. His shoes were spit-shined and he wore a suit, very rare in this environment and, more incongruously, a white-on-white shirt with a colorful tie done in a Windsor knot.

  It didn’t occur to Max until he was alone in his room and in his memories that evening. Of course. The epiphany exploded in Max’s mind and memory. It was none other than Sporty Morty. My God, Sporty Morty, Max exclaimed, suddenly revitalized, as if he had shed ten years in an instant.

  At breakfast in the dining room, he inspected the man and was even more certain. At the table were four giggling ladies listening intently to every word. Occasionally a wizened hand would pat a lady’s arm or stroke her cheek, setting off titters of pleasure. And there it was, the smile, the cleft, the dimples, untrammeled by time. Sporty Morty, with the luster and magnetism as intact as ever.

  After breakfast, the group shuffled into the main room, and Sporty Morty took his place in the center of the female group, smiling, patting, winking while the aged ladies fought for his attention.

  “Sporty Morty,” Max said. “Remember me? Max Ruben from the candy store.”

  He felt Sporty Morty’s inspection as he struggled for recall with dim eyes. Then came a flash of vague recognition.

  “Yeah Max. From the candy store.”

  “The same, a little older, but not much wiser,” Max cracked, hoping for the dimpled smile and nod.

  “Yeah,” Sporty Morty said tentatively. “I think I remember. Was it Max?”

  “Max from the candy store.”

  The nod was slow but accelerated as Sporty observed him. He turned to the woman surrounding him.

  “Meet my old friend, Max, from the candy store,” Sporty Morty said, introducing him to all the ladies by name. Max acknowledged them politely, but it seemed impossible for any of them to tear their attention away from Sporty Morty.

  Max wasn’t sure he had been remembered, but he did look for Sporty Morty after lunch, which was nap time at the home. He had found Sporty’s room number and knocked timorously, hoping he could renew old acquaintance.

  “The door’s open,” Sporty Morty said.

  There he was, unashamed, smiling his dimpled smile as he lay sandwiched between two of the ladies Max had seen with him earlier. All three were under the covers, crammed together on the bed, the woman resting their heads against Sporty Morty’s shoulders, enjoying his tender, patting embrace.

  “It’s OK,” Sporty Morty said. “We’re cuddling. It's therapy. Right girls?”

  Embarrassed, mumbling excuses, Max hurried away. Up to his old tricks, he thought, then giggled. Good old Sporty Morty.

  At dinner that night, he followed Max into the men’s room and both men stood side to side in the urinals, relieving themselves in slow motion.

  “Max is it?” Sporty asked.

  “From the candy store,” Max reminded.

  “Yeah, the candy store. Long time.”

  In the long interim Max Ruben pondered the nagging question.

  “How do you do it, Sporty Morty? What is the secret?”

  “Focus, Max, focus,” Sporty Morty said, nodding after some cogitation. Then looking downward briefly he said: “Good job, fella. You’ve been a loyal and faithful friend.”

  “Me?” Max asked, confused.

  “Not you, Max.” He pointed downward, this time with his chin. “It,” Sporty Morty said, showing his dimpled smile. He
zipped up, rinsed his hands, patted his hair, turned to Max, winked, and went out the door.

  The Dividing Line

  by Warren Adler

  Lavine was sitting in his East Side apartment reading the New York Times. From time to time he lifted his eyes to peer out the window, where across the street a glass-walled, spanking-new condominium was taking shape. His wife, Betsy, was sitting opposite reading the arts section of the Times. Occasionally she would glance upward and look at her husband.

  “We’ll just have to get used it,” she said.

  She was, he knew, a pragmatic woman. She knew how to cope, make do, steer around controversy and, mostly, how to keep him content. He was, now that he was seventy-five, eager to find tranquility, a tough chore in today’s global environment. The news from everywhere was awful, a bill of fare of suicide killings, mass murders, car bombs, ethnic slaughtering, and terrorism fears.

  They had been married twelve years now, and she was twenty years his junior. She was his former secretary when he was in full-time law practice, having worked for him for nearly fifteen years. The firm had a mandatory retirement age of sixty-five.

  As his secretary, Betsy was exemplary, efficient, competent, and understanding. Their relationship was friendly and beyond reproach, even in his widowhood. Neither would have dared to violate the stringent new politically correct rules regarding office behavior.

  With that stricture gone with his retirement, she swallowed her pride and approached him with both trepidation and courage.

  “If you ever marry again, consider me as your perfect choice of wife,” she told him when he considered his future on the cusp of retirement. “I know all your faults and virtues. I know your business. I have spent more time with you than anyone you know. And . . .” She winked at him. “I have always loved you.”

  Oddly, he was not shocked by the boldness of her assertion. He had always felt her special interest in him, and he harbored a vague attraction for her, even in his married days. She was, after all, quite attractive, with the kind of full figure he had always admired and she came to work perfectly groomed and attired in ways that set off her strong physical points. At times she had even entered his fantasy world, but he was too ethical, hidebound, and cowardly to open that window of action.