Buried on Avenue B

by Peter de Jonge

  “Makes sense,” says Wawrinka, who has followed her into the bedroom. “EMS would have picked it up and moved it out of the way when they wheeled Levin out.”

  “And if it was on the floor by his bed, it probably hadn’t been there long,” says O’Hara. “So why the fuck would Levin have brought a wooden spoon into his bedroom that morning?”

  Not ready to face the heat outside, O’Hara returns to her spot on the living room couch, but not before a detour to the kitchen for two more Amstels. If you can’t take the heat, she thinks, get into the kitchen.

  When O’Hara first walked into the apartment, she noticed a shape perched on the wall above the pass-through from the kitchen to the dining room, and now sees it’s a lovely antique angel carved out of wood, with pink chubby cheeks and dimpled cherubic thighs, strategically perched in the corner so that she can look out over the whole room.

  “See that angel?” asks O’Hara.

  “She’s kind of a honey.”

  “I bet when Levin’s wife realized she was dying, she put that angel up in the corner so that she could look out after her husband.”

  “You could be right. Too bad she did such a half-assed job.”

  CHAPTER 28

  SOL KLINGER IS not one to take unnecessary risks. Although the early-bird special at Sabia’s runs a generous hour and a half, from 5:00 to 6:30, he arrives at 4:45. When O’Hara walks in twenty minutes later, she finds him settled in a corner, the only customer in the place, gnawing a breadstick and studying the menu for loopholes.

  “To old friends,” says O’Hara after the waiter drops off her Amstel.

  “To Bunny ‘Schoolboy’ Levin,” says Klinger, “inch for inch, pound for pound, the toughest Jew I’ve ever known.” In his mid-eighties, Klinger still has some hair and some heft and some light in his eyes. Swathed in high-end fabrics, reading glasses dangling from a gold loop attached to a neck chain, he looks prosperous and relaxed in a way that makes the connection between the two obscenely transparent.

  “I guess that poor fellow at Sweet Tomatoes didn’t stand a chance,” says O’Hara.

  “I’m not talking about an old fart with a quick temper,” says Klinger, waving away whatever O’Hara may have heard with the stub of his breadstick. “I’m talking about a kid who as a junior at South Newark High School beat a leading contender for the lightweight title. The next day, his classmates carried him around the playground on their shoulders. Can you imagine how good that must have felt? I can’t, and I’ve been trying for seventy years.”

  Klinger reaches into a leather portfolio and drops an ancient publicity shot on the table. “This is from ’37,” he says, “before they banned religious symbols. Bun was seventeen.”

  Seventy years ago in a Newark gym, Levin adopts the classic pugilistic crouch. His thickly muscled arms and legs are poised for action, his taped fists ready to fly. But as always, it’s the eyes. Levin’s are soulful and belligerent and calm to the point of indifference, as if quietly informing his opponent that they can settle this now in the ring or some other time on a street corner, it’s all the same to him. Sewn on the leg of his silk trunks is the Star of David, and written in script across a bottom corner of the picture “Bunny ‘Schoolboy’ Levin,” although with his glistening black hair and fearless eyes, Levin looks more like John Garfield than a schoolboy.

  Kids grew up faster then, thinks O’Hara. Then she remembers the scene, however contrived, on the wall of the Chelsea gallery, and dismisses the thought as nonsense.

  “At seventeen, Bunny already had twelve pro fights. Three at the old Garden, two at Saint Nichols Arena on Sixty-Sixth Street. I know because I saw them all.”

  “You two been friends since then?”

  “Friends? He was the neighborhood hero—‘Schoolboy Levin.’ I was just Klinger, an actual schoolboy. I tagged along as much as he would tolerate it, and I helped him out. Like most parents, Bunny’s didn’t approve of the sweet science, even if it helped pay the rent. So I stowed his gear at my place. Our apartment was on the second floor. On his way to a fight, he’d stop below my window and whistle. Then I’d lower his bag down to him in the street.”

  “Did Bunny ever mention spending time with a young boy from New York, about nine years old, blond hair, a slight limp?”

  “I don’t think he’d been in New York in years. After the war the GI plan took him to college. Then like all of us, he got married. His wife’s family made disposable plastic gloves, the kind women wore at night over moisturizers. He grew the business, moved to the suburbs, and was lucky enough to sell it when it was still worth something. Me, I became a lawyer, did even better. It wasn’t until we met again down here that we became more like friends. Equals, almost. The only reference to a kid I can remember had something to do with helping some broad pay for her son’s tuition, but I don’t recall her being from New York.”

  “Financially, was Ben okay at that end?”

  “He was fine. Ben didn’t get excited about money. You saw his place. It would fit in my garage. For him, it was about proving something, making a point. The rappers on my grandsons’ CDs, they all sing about ‘representing.’ That’s what Bun was doing too. He represented the corner of East Fifth and Sparrow in South Newark. That’s why we all loved him.”

  “What was your reaction to the news?”

  “I was devastated. How do you think I’d feel? And not that I have any right to judge, not knowing all the details, but I was disappointed. In seventy years I’d never seen him back down. It wasn’t his style. I don’t think he could if he wanted to.”

  “So you think the suicide was staged?”

  “By who?”

  When the waiter returns to the table, O’Hara orders a burger, Klinger the salmon. “Could I get a salad with that?” he asks.

  “The special doesn’t come with a salad, sir. It comes with rice or a potato and the vegetable. Would you like to order a salad?”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Come on, Sol,” says O’Hara, “order the goddamn salad.”

  Klinger scowls at O’Hara and turns back to the waiter. “When you get back to the kitchen, if you see some lettuce and a couple tomatoes and maybe a mushroom or two, could you just drop them in a little pile on the plate next to the fish?”

  “A little pile?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That sounds a lot like a salad, sir.”

  “Maybe to you.”

  The waiter glances at O’Hara in a plea for empathy, but O’Hara looks past him at the empty restaurant. With its long mahogany bar and vintage movie posters, it could be in any city in America except New York.

  “At the end,” asks O’Hara, “was he still all there? Mentally.”

  “He was fine. Still did the crossword in ink. It’s not like boxing today. Those guys knew how to slip punches. His curse was that he still could fuck.”

  Why do Jews always find a way to talk about good things like they’re bad? What is that about?

  “An eighty-seven-year-old widower who can still fuck is just about guaranteed to go out like a schmuck. It would be okay if Bun would content himself with the old widow upstairs, but of course that’s not what he has in mind. Who does? He wants someone younger. Believes a young broad could still want him, can’t help but believe it, so he ends up paying some stranger’s kid’s tuition. Which pissed off his own daughter, and I don’t blame her.”

  “You remember anything about this woman?”

  “Actually, I think there were two. All I remember is that one had bad skin.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Bun must have told me. His point, I guess, was that she could actually care for him. She was young, too young for him, but she had her flaws too. Hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she did like him, and I’m just jealous. I’ve been jealous of him my whole life.”

  CHAPTER 29

/>   AFTER DINNER, O’HARA and Klinger dawdle under an awning in front of Klinger’s enormous pearl gray Lexus.

  “I get a new one every three years. That and a colonoscopy.”

  “Sol, I hope you’re good for half a dozen more . . . of each.”

  “Darlene. It was a pleasure.”

  It takes Klinger ten minutes to climb in, buckle up, and back out. When his taillights recede, it’s all of 5:45, and O’Hara still has way too much daylight to safely navigate. A couple blocks up is a twenty-screen cineplex. Hugging the sides of the buildings for shade, O’Hara walks the three deserted blocks to the ticket window, where she is reminded that a cineplex is a theater showing a long list of movies none of which you want to see. Of the wealth of shitty options, the only time that works is I Am Legend at 6:25, but she can’t get herself to step up to the glass window and pull the trigger.

  Don’t be a schmuck, Darlene, she tells herself in her best imitation of Wawrinka doing Klinger. Buy the frigging ticket, get yourself a nice bottle of pop and a bucket of popcorn, and lay low till the sun goes down. But as enticing as they are, two dark, sugary, salty refrigerated hours aren’t enough to get her to take $11 out of her wallet and hand it over to Will Smith. Not in this lifetime. She’d as soon get mugged.

  Next door is a sprawling bar, and when she steps in, she wonders if it’s owned by the same guy who owns the Italian place. Rather than old movie posters, the walls are plastered with legendary jocks, not the sweaty battle-tested undergear, which would actually be kind of interesting, but athletes and assorted memorabilia, not that it makes any difference, since it all feels like it was ordered out of the same restaurant/bar decorating catalogue. O’Hara revisits in her mind the wonderful old photograph Klinger showed her of Levin and juxtaposes it with the gallery shot of the still nameless kid. Levin, the poor first-generation immigrant who wandered into a gym and learned to throw and slip punches, would have liked the kid who wandered into Tompkins Square Park and learned to roll a joint and do an ollie. How could he not have? He was an updated version of himself—same balls, same attitude, Street Urchin 2.0. If only the old man had paid tuition for the kid instead of the son of some gold digger, maybe things would have turned out better for both of them.

  Unfortunately, nursing a beer is not part of O’Hara’s skill set. When her empty hits the coaster, it’s 6:15, and the thought of whiling away the evening in generic limbo is less appealing than I Am Legend. She remembers the museum by the airport and, on her way to dinner with Klinger, passing a bus stop with an ad for a show there of old-time circus photographs from the turn of the century. She calls the museum from her barstool and learns that on Thursdays, it’s open till 8:00.

  Twenty minutes later an elderly volunteer hands her a metal pin and a brochure and directs her to the two rooms devoted to the photography of Frederick Whitman Glasier. According to her reading material, Glasier, a failed jeweler, opened a portrait studio in Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1901. Two years later, the Barnum & Bailey Circus came to Brockton, and Glasier spent most of the next thirty years as its semiofficial in-house photographer. “If you ask me,” says the woman at the front desk, “he’s better than Ansel Adams. And do you know that all his pictures were taken on glass plates, so that they were composed upside down?”

  In their heyday, circus companies toured 150 cities and towns a year. A private train pulled into the station, and the whole town watched the animals and performers parade to the fairgrounds, where in six hours sledgehammer-wielding crews put up a canvas big top capable of covering 12,000. In beautiful set shots, Glasier captures the unfolding spectacle, but O’Hara is particularly taken by his portraits, which are displayed with snippets of Barnum’s original hyperbole. There are the acrobatic Hugony sisters, “marvels of strength and agility,” and the Marvells themselves, contortionists who perform “terpsichorean originalities and odd feats of gyrations with curious and comic episodes.” There are the Upside Down Bros., who walked down stairs on their heads, and the iron-jaw acts like the Kimball Twins, who flew through the air suspended by their teeth and performed “daring acts of dental dexterity.”

  O’Hara can’t help but appreciate that none of these gymnasts, contortionists, or aerialists are skinny girls. They’ve all got asses and tits and thighs proudly presented in skintight outfits that even a century down the road are blatantly erotic. The pictures of these intrepid young women remind O’Hara of her visit to Coney Island and her conversation in Williamsburg with Jennifer Miller, the bearded woman who was once a regular at the sideshow. When O’Hara asked Miller why she grew and kept her beard, she said she didn’t want to bow down. In a way that only a teenager can be, she was an impassioned feminist, and just coming out as a lesbian, and didn’t see why she should. The cost to Miller of keeping that beard has been biblical. It’s pushed her to the margins and made a very smart woman all but unemployable, and maybe she’s insane for hanging on to it, but thank God, thinks O’Hara, for young girls with balls. And maybe, thinks O’Hara, that little Coney Island pimp was not entirely full of shit when he was spouting about the value of seeing the iconography against which you will inevitably be judged. Clearly these circus performers were among the first feminists, and if no one is willing to be a freak, nothing ever changes. Without them, for all she knows, there’d still be no females in homicide.

  One picture given a prominent spot in the room catches a young aerialist named Maude Banvard as she flies high above the Brockton fairgrounds in 1907. O’Hara sees that fundamentally she’s no different from a seventeen-year-old Benjamin Levin stepping into the ring at the smoke-filled St. Nichols Arena in 1937, or Axl Rose O’Hara stepping onstage with the Flat Screens at the Ukrainian Center last week. As Klinger said about his old friend, it wasn’t about the money, it was about proving something to their friends and themselves. At some point, all these kids decided that the moments of their lives were worth fighting for, and they weren’t dissuaded by the fact that the odds were stacked against them, or that their mothers were worried about them, or that half the world thought they were schmucks for even trying.

  O’Hara is still standing transfixed in front of the photo when another old volunteer—this town is full of free old labor, she thinks—taps her on the shoulder and tells her the museum is about to close. On her way out, O’Hara passes through room after room filled with art with a capital “A,” including countless old Madonna and Childs and even a bona fide Rembrandt and a Rubens. Ringling, figures O’Hara, must have been overcompensating, trying to acquire some class and distance himself from his old cohort Barnum and “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

  CHAPTER 30

  WHEN O’HARA LEAVES the museum, it’s still ridiculously early, but she is resigned to call it a night, pick up some beer and take it back to the Marriott, where she can pull the shades and ponder the possible scenarios that would connect a pugilistic prodigy from South Newark and a precocious street urchin from the East Village. O’Hara could get the beer anywhere, of course, but loyalty to her favorite Florida bodega takes her back across the bridges to Longboat Key.

  On her second visit to Publix, O’Hara feels like a regular. She shakes loose a shopping cart, and like a dog who knows his route and favorite pissing spots, it tugs her to the happy aisle of beer. Here the choices are more reliable than at the cineplex, and as she gently lowers two six-packs of Amstel into the front of the cart, she notes their resemblance to Park Slope twins.

  To prolong her stay, rather than a realistic anticipation of appetites and needs, O’Hara decides to gather ingredients for her next few breakfasts and evening snacks and pushes off into more nutritious regions. At the wall of cereals, O’Hara pulls up beside a tall, stooped man sporting a gray cardigan with suede patches on the elbows. Like O’Hara, he has his eye on the Rice Krispies. “After you,” he says.

  “No way,” says O’Hara. “You were here first.”

  “I couldn’t care less,” says the old
man. He sounds as if his mouth is full of gravel, and wears horn-rimmed glasses. “I insist.”

  “Well, okay then.”

  Based on his lovely lonely chivalry, O’Hara makes him as the surviving half of a once happy couple, the so-called lucky one who fooled the actuaries and dodged the cancers and now gets to fend for himself on the sunny shores of the Gulf of Mexico. O’Hara should slip him Sol’s number so they can redeem their coupons and watch each other’s backs at Sweet Tomatoes.

  “Happy shopping,” says O’Hara with a parting smile.

  “The same to you, young lady.”

  Is there a surface as frictionless as well-polished linoleum? When the economy implodes for real, they can turn the old grocery stores into skateboard parks. O’Hara rolls her cart down the wide aisles, sometimes adding items indiscriminately, other times mulling the obscure differences between rival brands as seriously as if she were buying a car. Among other things, she buys reduced-fat milk, whole-wheat English muffins, and aluminum foil. Blue tostada chips, salsa, and a sketch pad. Bananas, blackberries, and five fresh pink Florida grapefruits. And since grapefruits don’t cut themselves, she has no choice but to head toward housewares to find a serrated knife. In the course of her circumnavigations, O’Hara makes several sightings of the old man and his cart with its handful of items, always in the smallest quantities available. Whenever their paths cross, O’Hara can see how much the old man values each interaction, however brief. She realizes that his excursion to Publix, for which he dressed so nattily, is a high point of his day.

  In the aisle with the kitchen utensils, O’Hara rolls up on an attractive woman wearing a kerchief and ankle-length beach cover-up and her daughter of twelve or thirteen. Something about them, their empty cart and aimless meandering sets off her cop’s antennae. Based on the woman’s loose-fitting outer garment and location in an aisle lined with relatively costly items, O’Hara guesses shoplifters. Reminding herself that she has her own homicide or homicides to deal with and that a high-tech grocery is more than capable of thwarting them on their own, she pushes the pair out of her mind and rolls past them to the knife display. She purchases the second cheapest of four serrated options, adds a toothbrush, dental floss, and SPF lip balm, and heads for the checkout.