“Pig!” she snapped. “You have a perverted mind. I read all the stories you write for those magazines. Spicy love stories, spicy detective stories, spicy adventures.”
He looked up at her. “You don’t have to read them.”
“I was curious what you were doing,” she said.
“Did they turn you on?” he asked.
“They disgust me,” she said. “If you want to call yourself a writer, why don’t you write for some decent magazines? Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Ladies’ Home Journal.”
“I tried,” he said. “I can’t write their kind of stories.” He sat silent for a moment. “But it’s not too bad. I’m averaging about fifteen dollars a week from them.”
“That’s not much,” she said. “I get thirty-five a week writing ad copy for A and S.”
“I don’t call that writing,” he said. “Besides you also work at the sales counter in the store.”
She ignored his remark as she walked to the door. “You better get downstairs,” she said. “Your mother is upset.”
He waited until he could hear her footsteps going down the staircase to the entrance hall before he got out of bed. He stretched and breathed deeply in front of the wide-open window. It was October, but the air was still warm and humid. It seemed as if the summer never wanted to let go. He leaned against the windowsill and looked down at the small driveway that separated their house and the house next door. He saw Motty coming out the side door.
“You’re going to be late to work,” he called.
“It’s Thursday. The store opens late on Thursday.”
“Oh.”
She looked up at him. “Are you working late tonight?”
“No,” he said.
“Maybe you’ll come by the store and pick me up. I don’t like the idea of coming home alone by myself. That’s a scary area at night.”
“I’ll call you,” he said. “I’ll try.”
“Okay,” she said and walked along the driveway to the street.
He turned back into his room. Motty was all right even though sometimes she was a pain in the ass. She had been living with them since she was ten years old. Her mother and father had been killed in an automobile accident and since his mother was the only relative she had, it was only right that his mother would take in her sister’s child.
He turned back to the room. His brother’s bed was still on the other side of the room as if he was expected home every night. Steven was his older brother, seven years older, and was in his third year in medical school in Oklahoma, and he made it home only about two weeks a year around the holidays. Sometimes he wondered if Steven was really his brother. Steven was always very serious, always studying, and ever since he had been a child he knew he wanted to be a doctor. He used to tease Steven that the reason he wanted to be a doctor was so that he could talk Motty into taking her clothes off and examine her. But Steven had no sense of humor. He never laughed.
Joe took a cigarette from a package on the dresser, lit it, and took a drag. The taste wasn’t that great. He really preferred Luckies but even though Luckies Green had gone to war—as the slogan put it—they still cost more than Twenty Grands, so that was what he smoked. He pinched the cigarette until it went out, then carefully left it in the ashtray so that he could relight it later. He put on his bathrobe and went out into the hallway, past his parents’ room next to the bathroom.
His mother had her back to him as he came into the kitchen. She didn’t turn to him. Still paring and scraping carrots over the sink, she spoke over her shoulder. “Would you like some breakfast?”
“No, thanks, Mama,” he said. “Just a cup of coffee, please.”
She still hadn’t turned to face him. “Coffee on an empty stomach is not good for you.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said, sitting at the kitchen table. He sat there holding and rolling the clincher between his fingers until the burnt end of the cigarette had tapped off.
His mother stared at the cigarette as she brought him a cup of coffee. “Cigarettes are the worst thing for you,” she said. “It will stunt your growth.”
He laughed. “Mama, I’m already five ten. I don’t think I’ll be growing anymore.”
“Did you see your letter?” she said suddenly.
He put down his cup of coffee before he tasted it. “What letter?”
It was on the kitchen table. She pushed it toward him. It looked like an official envelope. It had also been opened. He picked up the letter. It was official. It was from his draft board. Quickly he took the letter out. All he had to see was the first line: “Greetings.”
“Shit!” he said, then looked at his mother.
She was already crying.
“Cut it out, Mama,” he said. “It’s not the end of the world.”
“One-A,” she said. “In three weeks they want you to report to Grand Central for your physical.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “I’ve been One-A for over a year. And, besides I saw in the papers that only forty percent of the draftees pass their physicals. I may not even pass.”
“You should be so lucky,” she said snuffling.
He laughed again. “I’m sure we can do something. Papa’s a very close friend of Abe Stark. And there’s some others too we can talk with.” He didn’t want to tell her that Papa was very big with the Brownsville boys. She knew it but never wanted to mention it. She wouldn’t even acknowledge that her husband was loan-sharking as well as running his chicken market off Pitkin Avenue.
“With the draft board nobody has any influence,” she said. “You really have to have something wrong with you.”
“Maybe they’ll find out I have the clap,” he said.
She peered at him. “You have it?” She didn’t know whether she should be happy or angry.
“No,” he said.
“What happened with your job at the Daily News?” she asked. “They don’t draft newspaper people. You shouldn’t have quit it.”
“I didn’t quit it,” he said. “I told you many times, they fired me. They didn’t want anyone working for them in One-A because they couldn’t depend on it that he could keep the job.”
“Your girlfriend, the big writer on the paper—she could have done something about it.”
He was silent for a moment. There was no way he could tell her that it was because he was fucking Kitty that he got fired. He lit the clincher and blew out some smoke, then lifted his coffee to his lips. “At least you don’t have to worry about Steven, Mama,” he said. “He has to be safe for another four years.”
“You would have been safe too,” she said, “if you had taken the job at your Uncle Izzy’s machine shop.”
“We weren’t in the war then,” he said. “Besides, you know I couldn’t do that kind of work. I’m a writer.”
“You should have gone to City College,” she said. “Maybe that would have gotten you a deferment.”
“Maybe,” he answered. “But I didn’t pass the tests.”
“The trouble was, you were never serious,” she said. “You were always running around with those little whores.”
“Come on, Mama,” he said. “The next thing you’ll tell me, that I should have gotten married.”
“For a deferment,” his mother said, “I wouldn’t have complained even if you married one of those whores.”
“What would that have gained me?”
“Three-A,” she said. “And if you had a baby, maybe more.”
He shook his head. “But that’s all over. I never did any of those things so let’s forget about it.”
She looked at him and the tears began to come again. “I spoke to your father. He wants you to go down to his place and talk to him.”
“Okay,” he said. Then he smiled. “Maybe I’ll sleep at the chicken market for three or four nights before I go to Grand Central. Maybe I’ll be so covered with chicken lice that they’ll throw me out.”
“Don’t make fun of your father,” she
said.
He was silent. She had had a special shower built in the garage so that his father could leave his clothes there and wash up before he came into the house after work.
She went back to the sink. “Go upstairs and get dressed,” she said. “I’ll get you some breakfast before you go out.”
* * *
HE WALKED SLOWLY through the lunch-hour crowd on Pitkin Avenue. Looking through the windows of the Little Oriental restaurant, he could see every table already filled and a line of customers waiting for their turn to eat. Across the street, Loew’s Pitkin theater was taking down the sign advertising the early-bird matinee; now until six o’clock admission would be twenty-five cents. He wasn’t interested in the double feature they displayed. He liked it more when they used to have a stage show and a movie rather than the double features. They used to have great masters of ceremonies then—Dick Powell, Ozzie Nelson, all were wonderful. There were others too, but now all of them had gone to Hollywood to get into the movies.
He had walked four more blocks. Now there were no more expensive shops; the stores were plain and less decorated. Even Rosencrantz’s five-and-dime didn’t have the pizazz that Woolworth’s, just five streets before, had. He turned to the corner near the street where his father’s chicken market was located.
It was near the middle of the side street, in a large lot with a wire fence that completely enclosed it. In the corner of the lot was a small building about twenty feet square, then, next to the building, the wire fence continued, and in the middle two long wire gates that allowed the farm trucks to enter and bring the fowl from the country. Through the gate at the far end of the lot there was a long shed where the chickens and other fowl ran back and forth in narrow pens, adding to the noise of the street with their cackling and honking. He stood across the street and looked up at the painted sign across the whole front of the wire fence.
PHIL KRONOWITZ—ALBERT PAVONE
LIVE CHICKENS—GALLINE VIVE
KOSHER KILLED—RESTAURANTS SERVED
RABBINICAL SUPERVISION
WHOLESALE and RETAIL
The sign was painted with bold white lettering on a shining Italian green background. He stood there on the sidewalk while he finished his cigarette. His father didn’t like him to smoke.
He dropped the cigarette into the street and crossed to the small building. He turned the door knob. The door was locked. “Damn,” he said to himself. He hated to walk into the market through the open area. He disliked the smell and the noise and the blood of the fowl screaming their disaster.
Behind the building, he walked past the long shed. The first half of the shed was devoted to the kosher fowl. In front of it were a dozen triangular iron scoops, the bottom of each attached to a pipe that went into a pail. This was where the shochet slit a chicken’s throat and then thrust its head down into the scoop until the blood had been drained from its body. Then the shochet mumbled a prayer and gave the chicken to the customer—or, for an extra nickel or dime, handed the chicken to a “chicken-flicker” who plucked the feathers from its body, then passed it quickly over a fire to get rid of the lice and quill ends of the feathers. This was his father’s part of the market.
Al, his father’s partner, was a fat, smiling Italian. He sold many more fowl than Phil Kronowitz—not only because they were sold for less, but because there was no ritual to slow down the work. His workers just slit the fowls’ throats, then let them run crazy, splattering blood around the pen; and when they were dead, they were thrown into a vat of boiling water so that the feathers could be taken off with the large wire brush.
There were no customers in front of his father’s side. Two chicken-flickers and the shochet were sitting against the wall of the office building. The shochet was smoking a cigarette. He was a tall man with a long black beard and payess covering his cavernous face.
Joe spoke in English. “How are you, Rabbi?”
“How should I be?” the shochet answered. “Ich mach a leben,” he added in Yiddish, even though Joe knew he spoke English as well as he did.
Joe nodded. “Where is my father?”
“Where should he be?” the shochet replied.
“There’s nobody in the office,” Joe said. “What about Josie?”
Josie was the big lady who was the cashier and the bookkeeper. “She went out to lunch,” the shochet said.
“With my father?” he asked. He always had a feeling that his father was screwing Josie. She was a busty, big-assed lady—the kind his father liked.
The shochet seemed to think the same thing. “I mind my own business. I don’t know what anybody does on their own lunchtime.”
“Shithead,” Joe said to himself and walked across to where Al was standing near the boiling vats. “Buon giorno, Tio Alberto,” he said, smiling.
“Vass machst du, Yussele?” Al laughed. “Not bad for a luksh?”
Joe laughed too. “You speak better Yiddish than I do, Uncle Al.”
Al didn’t have to be asked. “Your father is having lunch at the Little Oriental. He told me you should go over there right away.”
“Little Oriental?” Joe asked. “I thought that Jake wouldn’t let him in the restaurant because he was afraid my father would bring some chicken lice into the place.”
“Your father took a bath and has a real suit on,” Al said. “And besides, even if he didn’t, Jake would let him in. Your father is having lunch with Mr. Buchalter.”
“Gurrah?” Joe asked. Al didn’t have to answer. Joe knew who they were. Lepke and Gurrah owned Brownsville and East New York. Even the Mafia wouldn’t fuck with them.
“Okay, Uncle Al, I’ll get right over there. Thanks.”
“I’m sorry about the One-A,” Al said. “I hope everything will be all right.”
“Thank you, Uncle Al,” he said. “It’ll be okay, whichever way it goes.”
2
LOUIS BUCHALTER WAS about five feet seven, with a pudgy face and expressionless eyes hidden by the broad-brimmed fedora that sat squarely on his head. There were two other men seated beside him at the round table as Joe sat down next to his father.
“So you’re the writer?” he said to Joe in a surprisingly thin voice.
“Yes, sir,” Joe said.
Buchalter looked at Joe’s father. “He’s a good-looking boy, Phil. So what’s the problem?”
“He’s One-A and his mother is going crazy.”
“He’s being called up for his examination already?”
“Yes,” Phil said. “In three weeks.”
Buchalter was silent for a moment. “Grand Central?” he finally said. “That’s going to make it expensive. It would have been easier if we had heard about him at the local draft board.”
“But you could do it?” Phil asked anxiously.
“Everything can be done,” Buchalter answered. “But like I said, it’ll be expensive.”
“How expensive?” Phil asked.
Buchalter’s eyes were inscrutable. “Two grand cash and twenty-five percent of the bank profits instead of ten.”
Joe looked at his father. “It’s not worth it, Papa. I have a forty percent chance that I can get a Four-F.”
“Grosser k’nocker!” his father said angrily. “What makes you such an expert?”
Joe was silent as Phil turned to Buchalter. “There’s no other way, Louis?” he asked.
Buchalter shook his head, then paused a moment. He looked at Joe but spoke to Phil. “Does he have a job?”
“No,” Phil said. “He works at home. He has a typewriter up in his room.”
“Could he work in a store?” Buchalter asked.
“What kind of a store?” Phil asked.
“It’s clean,” Buchalter said. “All he has to do is answer telephone messages, and once in a while deliver some packages.”
Phil was silent.
“And it will make it easier for us to change his classification. The store is in Manhattan, and if he gets a room near there, we could lose his dr
aft papers and give him a whole set under another name.” Buchalter looked at Joe. “Do you mind if you work with a shvartzer?”
Joe shook his head. “I don’t mind.”
“You’ll get twenty-five a week.”
“That makes it even better,” Joe said. “But will I have time to write?”
“You’ll have all the time you want,” Buchalter said. “No customers come into the store.”
“I don’t want my kid to wind up in the clink,” Phil said.
“Phil, would I do a thing like that to you?” Buchalter said.
“I know you wouldn’t,” Phil said. “But sometimes things go wrong.”
“I’ll guarantee it,” Buchalter said. “And if you do that for me, you can forget about the twenty-five percent of the bank and we’ll go back to the old figures.”
“And the two grand?” Phil pressed.
“That you have to pay,” Buchalter said. “The money is not for me. It’s for the guys who have to handle the paperwork.”
Phil thought for a moment, then held out his hand. “It’s a deal.”
Buchalter shook his hand, then turned to Joe. “Do you have your draft card and notice with you?”
“Yes, sir,” Joe said.
“Give them to me.”
Joe took them out of his pocket and handed them across the table. Buchalter looked at the papers for a moment and handed them to one of the men sitting next to him, who put them in his jacket pocket.
“Kronowitz,” Buchalter said. “We have to change that name. Do you have any ideas?”
“Joseph Crown is the name I write under,” Joe said.
“That’s good enough,” Buchalter said. He turned to the man next to him. “Make a note of that.”
The man nodded.
Buchalter turned again to Joe. “Write down this name and address. Tomorrow morning at ten o’clock, you go there.” He waited until Joe took out a pen and a small notebook. “Caribbean Imports, Fifty-third Street and Tenth Avenue. The man’s name is Jamaica. You can get the telephone number in the book.”
“Yes, sir,” Joe said.
“Anything else, Phil?” Buchalter asked.
The Storyteller Page 2