Fahrenheit 1600 (Victor Kozol)

by Jerry Weber

  FAHRENHEIT

  1600

  JERRY WEBER

  FAHRENHEIT 1600

  Book I: Victor Kozol Series

  Published by

  DocUmeant Publishing

  244 5th Avenue, Suite G-200

  NY, NY 10001

  Phone: 6462334366

  http://www.DocUmeantPublishing.com

  © 2016 Jerry Weber All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any way by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without the prior permission of the copyright holder, except as provided by USA copyright law.

  For permission contact the publisher at publisher@DocUmeantPublishing.com

  Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental with the exception of a few famous individuals and locations mentioned briefly. Celebrities or locations mentioned in this work do not represent endorsements by them, their heirs, or any business mentioned in this work of fiction.

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  Dedication

  To my wife, Cynthia. Thank you for not allowing Fahrenheit 1600 to be relegated to the dust bin.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: The Kozols

  Chapter 2 College Life

  Chapter 3 The Family Business

  Chapter 4 A New Beginning

  Chapter 5 Funeral Directing in a Small Town

  Chapter 6 Victor the Proprietor

  Chapter 7 Victor’s First Year in Business

  Chapter 8 Circling the Drain

  Chapter 9 Aftermath of Atlantic City

  Chapter 10 The Dinner Meeting

  Chapter 11 Reflecting

  Chapter 12 A Call to Action

  Chapter 13 ‘Firestop’

  Chapter 14 Victor and ‘Firestop’

  Chapter 15 Throwing Out the Bait

  Chapter 16 Going for the Close

  Chapter 17 Onward, Upward, & Downward

  Chapter 18 The Hammer

  Chapter 19 Fight or Flight

  Chapter 20 Under the Spell of the Mob

  Chapter 21 Charley Jones

  Chapter 22 Euphoria at Rosselli’s

  Chapter 23 Jack Cardigan

  Chapter 24 Success in a Business

  Chapter 25 Karen

  Chapter 26 The Sunday Dinner

  Chapter 27 Fat Joe

  Chapter 28 Fat Joe the Fifth Case for Victor

  Chapter 29 Digging Out

  Chapter 30 Sam

  Chapter 31 Hitting Bottom

  Chapter 32 The FBI

  Chapter 33 Sam Tells Almost All

  Chapter 34 Tested

  Chapter 35 Trial Run

  Chapter 36 The Real Deal

  Chapter 37 Celebration

  Chapter 38 The Unraveling

  Chapter 39 Duryea

  Chapter 40 Duryea Revisited

  Chapter 41 A Future

  Chapter 42 Clouds on the Horizon

  Chapter 43 Starting Over

  Chapter 44 Success

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Book II Preview

  Prologue

  Wilkes-Barre, PA. circa 1984, is a small city situated on the banks of the Susquehanna River in the northeast Pennsylvania anthracite coal region. Three blocks south of the business district, South Franklin Street is a peaceful street in a residential neighborhood. The large Victorian homes that line this bucolic street speak of a bygone era when coal barons, professionals, and business people inhabited the neighborhood.

  Depending on whom you asked, the city’s name was pronounced as either “bear” or “berry”—even by the locals. In any event, Wilkes University had been slowly buying up the properties in a several square block area with plans to expand since the 1940s.

  Just south of the University’s main campus, the two hundred block of South Franklin Street has had several of its larger buildings converted into college dormitories. Many of the remaining old mansions have long since been turned into apartment buildings. This urban campus became an island of prosperity in a post industrial town that has, like most American cities, seen significant change.

  Sophie Lunitis is the owner of one of these Franklin Street buildings, a quadplex brick structure built around 1900. Sophie and her husband Joseph purchased the building thirty years before as a place to live and provide an income. They had the old mansion divided into four apartments; theirs was on the first floor and there were three for rent.

  After retiring and living together for twenty years, Joseph died from a heart attack. This left Sophie to carry on alone—they had no children. For the first two decades, many from the Lithuanian community, along with the ethnic Poles and Italians and others who once worked the coal mines and later retired, lived in Sophie’s building. But in the last ten years, many of her tenants either died or moved on.

  The only real opportunities to rent for a good price came from Wilkes University students. Sophie didn’t like most of the students. She came from another generation; one might even say another world. Hers was an era using last names and shaking hands and of ladies who wore hats and gloves.

  Her ethnic background also meant that Sophie was, well, one might say she was the first environmentalist. Sophie treated just about everything, including tap water, like a scarce resource that could run out at any moment if not carefully rationed. Perhaps it was some ancestral memory from Eastern Europe, where the difference between making it through the winter and starving to death was this ability to see the value in every scrap of cloth and crumb of bread.

  As a consequence, Sophie had something of a hoarding tendency. There were those old flannel shirts she meant to cut up into rags and Danish butter cookie tins she was going to sort her button collection into, but she did have the lowest electricity bill on the block—perhaps even the state.

  The way her new tenants, a generation of spoiled kids who thought “money grew on trees” (a favorite expression of Sophie’s), wasted resources drove Sophie into apoplectic fits. She was not above pounding furiously on the door to the apartment above her if she heard a shower running for too long. This often led some of the young women to shriek that she had no right to invade their privacy. Undaunted, Sophie would inevitably retort that they had “No right to waste good water someone else might need.”

  “I’m pretty sure there’s enough to go around.” one tenant had responded, her voice dripping with sarcasm as she looked at the little old woman with something like pity.

  “Is that so? Well, I’m not so sure you’re the best person to judge. What is it you study, basket weaving?”

  “Sociology” the young woman replied through gritted teeth.

  “Well, you’re not a civil engineer or geologist, that’s for sure, and if you do manage to use up all the water around here, you’ll have a hard time dyeing your hair that trashy color or washing all that makeup off your face, so you might want to go easy on things.” Indeed, the young woman had blue eyeliner streaming from one eye and her hair was an unnatural yellow.

  Sophie had turned and marched down the stairs to her apartment after this altercation, feeling vindicated and happy for the opportunity to educate the next generation in the ways of this world.

  The young woman, on the other hand, had called half a dozen friends to recount her unprovoked abuse at the hands of her landlady (with several dramatic embellishments), lost hours of sleep ov
er “the nerve of that woman,” contemplated moving out, realized it was too much effort, and then, finally, stayed. She also, although it was something she never consciously admitted to herself, stopped taking such long showers and switched to a blond hair dye with more ash tones.

  Sophie wasn’t one to lose arguments once she started them and she started them often.

  True to her highly conservative nature, Sophie never took out the anthracite coal boiler in her basement. This meant that every day she had to load fresh coal into her stoker hopper. This was a semi-automatic gravity-fed device that saved shoveling into the fire several times a day. However, every other day her coal furnace created heaps of ashes from the burnt coal which had to be carried out in pails. At seventy and alone, Sophie, as sharp and agile physically as she was mentally, could still do this job. Knowing that she was paying less for heat than many of her neighbors was all the motivation she needed. She also secretly enjoyed the idea that she produced her own ashes for covered her slippery driveway during winter while her neighbors—the spendthrift fools—would buy bags of salt at the local store.

  The only downside to this was that she would inevitably come home on a wintery day to see a window wide open with her precious heat escaping. Nothing made Sophie angrier.

  “Victor!” she bellowed up the stairs towards Victor Kozol’s apartment, “I said I provide heat for you not the entire city!”

  “Okay Sophie, I’ll take care of it.” Still, the guilty party, a young man by the name of Victor Kozol, was not in any hurry to close the window. After all, even that old witch Sophie might know what marijuana smells like.

  Victor was a first-year pre-med student from Duryea, a town about eight miles away and was upstairs indulging in a well-deserved rest after carrying up the last of the beer, wine, and other supplies for his latest party. It was scheduled for tonight, so he needed to marshal his strength. Victor inhaled deeply and wondered just how problematic his landlady was going to be.

  Sophie was thinking, things were different in the ‘good old days’. Old Doc Francis, the founding president of Wilkes didn’t allow alcohol to be served anywhere on campus, and that included faculty events. Francis was known to threaten local neighborhood bar owners not to serve his under 21 students unless they wanted to hear from the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. And, of course, alcohol was not allowed in college dormitories. Yes, things were a lot quieter and much better back then, Sophie thought.

  In the early hours of Saturday morning Sophie found herself in her kitchen fuming, she has once again banged on the hot water pipes going up to Victor’s apartment which is directly above hers.

  “Silence,” she yelled, “it’s after midnight!”

  When we were these students’ age, we had to get to sleep so we could get to work the next day, Sophie thought, angrily. Her not-so fond remembrances of her summer working at a button factory in Scranton were rudely interrupted by a blood-curdling scream. Sophie looked out her kitchen window just in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of a young coed in a chair fall into the evergreen bush behind her back porch. It was 1:00 a.m. and soon sirens are blaring.

  Within minutes an ambulance backed into the driveway beside her home to the scene of the accident. Sophie couldn’t believe it; the young girl was actually limping away towards the ambulance with assistance from the paramedics.

  “Vai tu zmogau” she hollers in Lithuanian, “How’s she not dead?” This is the last straw, thought Sophie. Victor must go.

  Directly above Sophie, Victor is sitting in his trashed living room, wondering how such a fun-filled and lucrative evening could go so wrong. This Friday, Vic had done his usual thing. He sold tickets to twenty students he knew from campus for $10.00 each. He then schlepped the beer, wine, and other supplies up the steps all afternoon to prepare for the event. With $200.00 income, Vic had doubled his money. He mused to himself, this is how you enjoy college life and make spending money on the side. Life was good. Good until Jake dared Allison to balance on a chair out on the fire escape landing railing. It still could have ended cool, but Charley needed another beer and bumped the chair leg trying to squeeze by; thus propelling Allison 15 feet down into the bushes. Why did ten people have to want to smoke outside on the fire escape at the same time? Do these college students have no brains?

  Two days later, Victor was sitting in front of Dr. Scharter, the Dean of Men at Wilkes. This time the party hit the front page of the “Times Leader”—the local newspaper. While the paper stated that Allison was treated and released from the hospital, Victor was not going to have an easy time of it. Dr. Scharter went through the usual bromides about the college and its image and relationship with the community, personal responsibility, and whatever else is usually said at these meetings. Victor was given social probation for the rest of the year and warned that the next time there would be no need for a meeting. What Scharter didn’t know at the time, since it was only mid-term, was that Victor was missing half of his classes and flunking or getting D’s in most of his subjects. None of this boded well for Vic’s continuation at Wilkes.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Kozols

  The town of Duryea lies midway between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, the two largest cities in northeastern Pennsylvania, themselves more like large towns. Claiming a population of 140,000 in the 1930s, Scranton is now just a fraction of its former size. Only about 80,000 remain by the late 1980s and the demographic is aging. Wilkes-Barre experienced a similar decline, sinking from 70,000 to 40,000 during the same period. With six thousand residents, Duryea, like so many other small towns that benefitted from the area’s coal mines, is also a smaller place than it was fifty years ago.

  Northeastern Pennsylvania once supplied the entire East Coast with anthracite, the hard coal preferred for heating homes, hotels, and factories. They all benefitted from an energy source that was cheap and plentiful. But after World War II, the government ended its rationing of oil and gas. These two competing fossil fuels from places far away like Oklahoma and Texas were soon flooding eastward to power the booming American economy. By the 1950s, most residences and businesses had abandoned coal and switched to oil burners or gas furnaces. The reason was simple. Heat from furnaces powered by these fuels could be more easily regulated and there was no solid by-product (coal cinders) to dispose of. What was left after combustion went into the air and it would be decades before anyone cared much about that.

  America in the late 1980s was still a time of profligate energy consumption. Cars were big and woefully inefficient, gas and oil was a negligible extra expense, but few people in the “Coal Regions” drove their pickup trucks to a mine. Instead, they transitioned to whatever service jobs as could be found with the government, the large local hospitals, and some industrial plants sprinkled throughout the area—or they simply left.

  The Kozol family was fortunate not to have to change occupations with the times. Victor’s father ran a family-owned funeral business that was established over fifty years ago by his father, and death was one of few constants in America’s shifting cultural and economic landscape. People died and it still cost a good bit of money to respectfully transition bodies to ash or earth. The area’s aging population was good for business, to be sure, but this boon was offset by a declining overall population base.

  Victor, his parents, and a sister who was three years older lived in an apartment above the funeral home in the center of Duryea. Victor’s father, Albert, never had more than the one year of post high school education required to receive a funeral director’s license in the state of Pennsylvania. He always hoped his two children would get four year degrees and, in Victor’s case, maybe become a doctor. Victor’s sister, Anne, had always been very self-driven and decided to attend Wilkes University. She majored in elementary education and became a teacher. Anne also met another young teacher while earning her educational credits and got married. Albert had nephews living down state who were both doctors. He, of course, would like nothing better than to match h
is brothers with a doctor of his own in the family.

  Not one to leave things to chance, Albert took Victor aside during his junior year at Duryea High School and told him about the great future he could have in medicine.

  “I believe that every generation should do a little better than the one before it,” said Albert as he began his rehearsed “American Dream” speech. “My grandfather, after emigrating from Poland, worked in the mines and then died at the age of fifty with miner’s asthma (aka black lung disease). My father, not wanting to suffer the same fate, got involved in the funeral business by helping an old undertaker. Later he started his own business; and I was proud to run it when I left school, but the area isn’t what it was. You don’t have to be stuck here, Victor. Getting a medical or legal degree is the next step up the ladder. If you’re a doctor or a lawyer, you can move anywhere you like. Look at your sister Anne. She has tenure and a guaranteed income from teaching. Of course, due to the nature of our business and the things you’ve been exposed to, I imagine you’d have a leg up in medicine, and we’d be willing to help with the tuition fees.”

  Victor’s mind immediately filled with images of himself pulling into a large hospital in a new Mercedes Roadster. His parking spot would have a plaque, “Reserved for Dr. Kozol.”

  “Is this something you’re interested in?” Albert asked, interrupting Victor’s reverie.

  “I think so, yes.” Victor said.

  Albert smiled. The problem was that Victor would say anything to his father to get more allowance or use of the family car. He was only average in school because he didn’t study, but he was smart enough to not flunk or get D’s in his courses. He was never motivated to excel, but he was able to score pretty high on his SAT’s, so college was definitely going to be available to him. Victor’s real talents were more social. He was one of the more popular kids in high school. He always had something to do; the phone was usually for him.

  In his senior year, Vic was no National Merit Scholar, but his SAT’s allowed him, along with his father’s ability to pay the tuition, to get accepted by two local colleges. With his father’s guidance and cajoling, Vic chose Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre and selected pre-med as his major. On a bright and cheerful September day, the family dropped Vic off at his new apartment on South Franklin Street.