“We all make our way through the world,” I said. “If our mothers are watching from some heavenly lookout, I suppose they understand.” Not the conversation I wanted to have. “At least when I walk through the door I don’t hurt anyone. You, Shmulie, you hurt the world just by getting out of bed in the morning, off to poison the world with your witty little formula.”
There. I told him off. Now just get up and leave.
Shmulie sat unperturbed. He sipped his drink and, sounding puzzled, he asked, “Me sell drugs? You don’t think I’d dirty my hands with such things, do you?”
“Even the illiterate, blind, and brain dead know how you earn your livelihood,” I answered, wishing he understood that it was time to rise and leave.
But no. Shmulie smiled, leaned back, and linked his hands behind his head, revealing stained armpits and red suspenders.
“Now look, Nicky. I am, as they say, a legitimate man of business. I own stock, you know? Do you own stock?” He didn’t wait for the answer. “My broker calls me on Mondays and Wednesdays. Sometimes I make a few bucks, sometimes I lose a few. Usually I make a few. And I’m a philanthropist. Every summer I pay for two hundred poor kids to go to camp. I got a dozen folders filled with their thank-you notes.”
I am not by nature violent. At that moment, however, I became consumed with the urge to bury my fist in his voracious belly and watch as the wooden chair collapsed beneath him.
“Shmulie,” I said. “Get up and go somewhere.”
He looked at me like the father of a wayward child. “Why are you angry with me? We’re old buddies you and me. You’re my chavruta.” He rubbed his right eye. “Nicky, I walk in here and I spot you. I say to myself, ‘I think that’s Nicky.’ And it was. Amazing! Maybe we’ll have a reunion, I think, a few drinks, talk about the old days. But I see I arouse your ire. What’d I ever do to you?”
But he knew goddamned well what he did to me, what I’d been carrying within me for decades, since that night near the end of high school when I became a secondary character in an experiment gone terribly wrong.
He waved the waitress to our table. “Two more,” he said, “and keep them coming.” To me he said, “Drink with me, bachur. I’m buying.” He smiled, sipping Scotch, looking me over like I was at the center of the world. He said nothing until the next round appeared.
“You always had principles,” he said, pulling a gold cigarette case from his pocket. He opened it and extracted a cigarette. “Ten thousand dollars on eBay,” he said, raising the case. He reached into another jacket pocket, pulled out a cigarette holder and pressed the cigarette into it. He placed it in his mouth, reached into yet another pocket and produced a rectangular lighter. He saw me looking.
“A Telford’s,” he said. “Eighty k.” He lit the cigarette and puffed for a long moment. “For that kind of money you get a better class of flame. The tobacco tastes better, too, for having rested in gold.” He removed the holder from his mouth.
“You always wanted to believe,” he said. “When we were kids you believed in miracles. But didn’t work for you, all that miracle crap. God didn’t work. None of that horseshit worked for me either. That’s why we’re here on Shabbos.”
He took another drag. “What do you believe in now, bachur.”
The son of a bitch had struck a chord. As a kid I believed God gave the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai. I desperately wanted the God who would vanquish evil, but in the end there existed far too much of it.
“It’s complicated, Shmulie,” I said, slipping into academic mode with the help of the booze. “The life of reading books and writing articles gives one an existential security of a sort. I’m surrounded by people who a hundred years ago all would have been devout as hell. But now no one can be pious, at least not in the old ways. Life’s too complicated. The existence of what we can’t see is too uncertain, and the existence of what we do see is so loathsome it’s impossible to talk about a divine order of things. So, we become accountants of knowledge. We know everything and believe none of it.”
Shmulie stood up and removed his suit jacket. He hung it on the back of his chair and sat down. He said, “You professors are a bunch of gibbering morons. You don’t give a shit about the divine order of anything. All you want is to pontificate into the wind.”
Shmulie stared upward. I recognized it from the old days—how he’d lose himself puzzling over a text. He’d gaze at the ceiling until something came to him, as it always did, and he’d give an original analysis of the problem at hand.
He said, “The old Talmudist is an atheist! We’re the same you and me. We were the same when we were kids, and we’re the same now.” His tone declared victory.
Two more Scotches migrated to the table. I was well beyond caring who was buying. The guitarist played the sweetest version of “Born Under a Bad Sign” I’d ever heard.
“It’s not fair to say I’m an atheist.”
“Oh no? What do you call it, then?”
“I’m a victim of post-postmodern stress syndrome.”
“Huh?” asked Shmulie.
“I mean I don’t know what I believe, and there are too many unsolved issues to make what we used to call faith a possibility.”
“Such as?”
“Beyond what I’ve already said?”
“I didn’t understand a word of what you said, to tell the truth.” As good as he was at talmudic reasoning, Shmulie never developed even one philosophical, or for that matter moral, synapse.
“Try this. A ten-year-old boy walks into a store to pick up something for his mother and gets his head blown off by a robber. The God of human history can’t be found in that event no matter how hard you look. There’s this—I don’t know what you call him—this Jewish modern neo-mystic in my department. He would have the balls to say, in all seriousness, that God was responsible for that boy’s death. But he’s an idiot. When a boy gets killed, God is nowhere within a hundred miles. If there is a God.”
“So what?” Shmulie said. “That problem’s been with us for a long time. You didn’t discover it.”
“I didn’t. Just because I didn’t invent the problem of evil doesn’t mean I can’t be bedeviled by it, especially when we’ve seen it magnified by so many tens of millions of dead. It’s not the death of one child, but of millions of children. Where’s the God of history?”
Shmulie shoved his now smoldering cigarette toward my face. “You know, if you ever want to give up this life of hypocrisy you live, you could join up with me and Esther. I’d put you to work pronto. You’ve got brains, you have. I can always use someone with brains. It’d be like the old days. I’d pay a hell of a lot better than any college job. I’d even make you partner. Not full partner, you understand,” he said.
I smirked. “You’re joking, right? I’d sooner have my skin flayed before a cheering crowd than earn one dollar working for you.”
He loosened his tie. “You’re not too proud to let me buy you drinks.”
“I’ll drink your booze and smoke your butts,” I said, grabbing his cigarettes and lighting it with the Telford’s. “But I’d sooner eat raw sewage over rice than become your employee.”
“If that’s the way you want it,” Shmulie said, placing his hands on the table palms up.
He dabbed his upper lip with his cocktail napkin and again rubbed his blinking eye. “Belief. It was a puzzle for me, too. I used to think I didn’t believe in anything. But some years after I moved to Manhattan, I realized I’d been a believer since I was a kid.”
I stirred my drink with my finger. “What do you believe in?” I asked.
“You ask the wrong question, my old friend. It’s not what I believe in. It’s who,” he said. “Me. I believe in me.”
I feared he would break into song.
“A long time ago I learned believing in me gave me great power.” He downed the whole Scotch. “Tell m
e something, Nicky. How much do you earn?”
I named a figure considerably higher than the real sum in a vain attempt to defend myself against what was sure to be his response.
He snorted with pleasure. “I pull in that kind of money in a day, you know? No, half a day. Not only am I rich, I get richer by the minute. As I pronounce these words I am earning more money than you do in a month. In three months. It’s a miracle, making money. Once you start, you can’t stop. It’s like your money craves company. All kinds of good folks want to help it along by giving it little green brothers and sisters.
“It’s unbelievable what I can do with my money. I buy what I want and no one stops me. I fuck who I want and no one stops me. I have influence.” He leaned forward and put his head in both hands. “Do you know if I wanted to I could have you killed just by making a call?” He produced his cell phone and pushed it in my direction. “You, a little pisher college professor? Wouldn’t cost me much. Come to think of it, I could get someone to do it for free. You know, a favor. A lot of people owe me favors.”
He returned the phone to his pocket.
“And that, dear boy, is power—when someone owes you a big enough favor to squash someone for you for nothing.” He gestured for another pair of drinks, staring at me in silence, licking his lips.
I looked at him as frightened as someone thoroughly anesthetized could be. If I wasn’t mistaken, the bastard had just threatened to have me killed.
When the next round arrived, Shmulie took a swallow and leaned back. At the rate he was inhaling Scotch, I figured he’d collapse the chair by himself. However, he wouldn’t feel a damned thing when it happened.
I worked my third triple Scotch. I lay the glass on the table. I said, “Power. It’s power you believe in. Power to control and hurt other people. You’re nothing new. You’re just someone on a huge list of people who love control. But if I’ve learned anything, it’s this. Your type of power is empty. I mean, you say you’ve got a lot of money. No surprise. The drug business is lucrative. Everyone knows.” My words traveled along an emotional trajectory that had been festering for decades.
“What do you do with your money? All right, so you send some poor kids to camp. Nothing but window dressing. Maybe you need to feel you did some good. Maybe you need to have it under your belt to fling at the likes of me. Not enough for you. No. You have to take pride in telling me how much you enjoy hurting people.”
Shmulie interrupted my discourse. “Gotta go take a piss.”
As he walked away, my cheeks were numb, and the guitar sounded far away. I hoped he was gone for good. But he returned, his vest undone, white shirttail sticking out from his zipper. He placed his hands on the table and lowered himself into the chair.
“You were saying?” he asked.
I wrestled my mind back to the conversation, dimly at first, then dead on.
“You tell me you can have me put to sleep. No doubt. So what? You’d have ruined one man’s life—and injured everyone else who had any association with him. Your act does nothing but eliminate a minor annoyance in your life while destroying my life and saddening everyone in my circle.”
Shmulie dabbed his mouth again with his napkin and poked at a small puddle caused by condensation around his glass.
“What’s that kind of power good for?” I asked. “Building a world of misery. What’s that worth? Shit. Not even worth shit. Shit fertilizes your garden. Your money, your power are nothing because you use it for destruction. You make your money in violence and with it you do violence, and chances are you’ll end in violence.”
All right. It was a soliloquy, a sermon. I doubted Shmulie had heard a word.
“You’re still the moralist, Nicky. Maybe you believe in something after all,” said Shmulie Shimmer.
There was a long pause. Shmulie tried unsuccessfully to find his eighty-thousand-dollar lighter, and I lit the wrong end of a Marlboro. The guitar player, having taken a break, began his next set with a smooth version of “Senor Blues.”
“You know, Nicky, why don’t you cut out this moralist crap and come work for me?”
“Answer’s still no.” I puffed and sipped.
From out of nowhere he asked, “Remember the dog, Nicky?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Loved that dog, you know?” he said.
“I know,” I answered, captured for a moment by the memory.
It was a filthy mongrel, part German shepherd and part God knows what, that landed on Shmulie’s porch one early spring morning out of nowhere. We were maybe fifteen.
Packs of wild dogs wandered Brooklyn. They came out mainly at night to hunt for food. Mostly they were harmless. Occasionally, one would detach himself from the pack to try the domesticated life, this scruffy thing being a case in point.
Shmulie begged his parents to let him keep the mutt, and after considerable noisiness they relented.
He took wonderful care of him. He bathed him, fed him, walked him twice a day. The cost of a license and the vet came from his savings. With my consent, he named the dog Yossi after one rabbi toward whom we both bore a great animus. Shmulie could shout “Yossi come, Yossi sit, Yossi lie down!” and it would obey meekly, unlike his namesake. Besides this one joke, Shmulie showed Yossi the dog a hundred kindnesses. A thousand kindnesses.
Though Shmulie bonded with Yossi, the animal never returned the favor. He was obedient enough, coming when called, eating what was put in front of him, walking cooperatively about the neighborhood on a leash. He never dreamt of biting his newfound master or displaying any other form of displeasure. But in truth, the mutt only tolerated Shmulie. This may seem difficult to believe, but I swear this dog felt superior to Shmulie, an attitude unmistakably present in the dog’s every motion.
Well, the damnedest thing happened.
One summer night maybe four months after he’d adopted the dog, Shmulie and I were sitting with Yossi on Shmulie’s front porch passing the time drinking Cokes, when we heard loud yapping around the corner. It sounded like a small circus had escaped and was heading our way. A pack of dogs, maybe fifteen of them, approached, their nails clicking on the sidewalk. They halted at the bottom of the steps. They sat and stared up at Yossi, waiting, tails wagging simultaneously.
The pack didn’t have to wait long for Yossi to decide. The son of a bitch flashed Shmulie a haughty glance, jumped up and ran off the porch, his legs slipping and sliding to the steps. He skidded downstairs and joined his comrades. In a rhythmic movement so precise it could have been choreographed, those dogs rose, parted, admitted Yossi to the clan, turned tail, and headed in the direction from which they’d come, rounding the corner, yapping and clicking, disappearing into the night.
Shmulie looked at his drink. “You know what that fucking dog taught me?”
Instinctively, I entered the game. “You learned never spend your allowance on a pack dog.”
“No.”
“Never name a dog after a rabbi.”
“No.”
“Always leash the ones you love.”
“Nope.”
“Run with the pack and you’ll never be alone on a cold, dark night?”
“Uh-uh.”
Through the alcohol haze I remembered I despised Shmulie, and I remembered why. I stopped playing and stared forward, avoiding his eyes.
“What’s the matter, Professor, don’t want to play anymore?”
I sat immobile, my face aimed at the table.
“All right, then. I’ll tell you what I learned. I learned if you got friends, you’ll never be stuck in a shithole long. Your friends will always bail you out.”
I stopped sulking and aimed my gaze at the monstrous hulk sitting before me.
“You know what, Shmulie? You may be right about having friends bailing you out. But a man like you, he doesn’t have the friends he thinks he has, the
kind who’ll come to his porch in a pack. You almost certainly do have so-called friends who run at night, eat out of garbage cans, who sleep in the gutter, who run away from the footsteps that fill the night.”
“Wrong, Nicky. I never run from anybody. People run from me.”
Like John Wayne I said, “The law’ll get you sooner or later.”
He pulled at his tie and finished the Scotch. “Crap,” he said. “I’m a powerful man. I’ll live like this until I die, and I’m going to die a very old man.”
He pointed to the guitarist. “Look at his right hand,” he said. And for the second time that evening I observed that he was missing his right pinkie finger. “I didn’t come here this evening to drink and chat about old times. An unexpected bonus that was. I came tonight to check up on him. An old acquaintance of mine,” he said, pointing an index finger toward the guitarist. Shmulie pulled out a vial filled with liquid. Suspended in it was unmistakably a human finger, probably a pinkie.
“He’d do business for me. Music, you know, never pays well. This one told me he wanted to moonlight for me, and I let him. Musicians and drugs, you know? One day he didn’t do his job so well and he lost me a couple of dollars. This was how he paid me back,” he said, pushing the vial toward my face. I recoiled. “I came tonight to remind him,” he said, lifting the jar one more time.
The guitarist looked our way with fear, or nausea, or mere recognition.
“You see, Nicky, me, I’m invulnerable.” He returned the finger in a jar to his pocket and lit another cigarette with that obscenely expensive lighter.
CHAPTER 13
VELVET UNDERGROUND
I’D RETURNED TO BROOKLYN late, and I went to sleep immediately. Now, I was sitting at my kitchen table, sipping tea, working on a bowl of oatmeal, thinking about the place Esther suggested I visit. A wealth of information about the Velvet Underground lived on the Internet, what with rumors, conspiracy theories, and alternative facts propagating on social media. Suspicions that much of it was, in fact, disinformation ran high. In a world in which everyone and everything was exposed to burning sunlight, the nature of the Velvet Underground somehow managed a heavy veil of secrecy.
Nick Bones Underground Page 8