Sugar Pop Moon (2 page)

“Santi, bring Officer Larch a couple of beers while I figure out what's going on.”

“Immediately,” Santi says and heads to the bar.

My underarms are hot and clammy as I make a beeline past Santi and trot down the cement stairs behind the right pocket door. I walk through the kitchen to the back of the house; then I lift the broken wooden palette off the tiled floor in front of Jimmy's office. Muscling open the hatch, I carefully make my way down the three drop-steps and land in the dank subbasement. Santi calls this place the ratacombs on account of the furry creatures crawling around. I see one scamper across the floor but I let it go. It's good that the little bastards are down here; they keep uninvited punks from venturing too far into the space.

The ratacombs are dark and the musty air cools the beads of sweat that are forming across the back of my neck. I light the lamp under the hatch. To my left is the underground stairway that climbs up to Jimmy's office, but I head for the metal utility door that's camouflaged to look like part of the brick wall. Jimmy keeps the liquor piled up in a dark hole that is part of the neighboring row house, 321 West Fifty-Third Street. In one of his usual fits of paranoia, he bought that house just to have a place to store the stash. “Off-premises,” he calls it. He even had some fancy law firm on Fifth Avenue create a paper trail that put both places in his cousin's name, so if the Feds were ever to stumble upon the liquor next door, they'd have to pin it on Jimmy's cousin. And Jimmy's cousin is dead.

The door is heavy, but I push it open and make my way to the stash. I rip open two cases of shine, pull a brown bottle from each, crack their paper seals and taste them. The first is counterfeit for sure. The second is even worse. I go through four bottles before finding a decent one.

I'm screwed. I bought this stuff off of a guy I don't even know, a crook named Denny Gazzara. It's not like I had a choice. Owney Madden's boys wouldn't drop their weekly shipment with me. They drove up in their polished Studebaker, tailed by a truck full of whiskey just like always, but the big guy with the cauliflower ear said he wouldn't hand off the booze unless he met with Jimmy first. When I told him Jimmy was staying out of sight until the heat from last week's raid dies down, he leaned out the window and told me flat out, “This load ain't for niggers.” The joke is that I'm practically as white as he is, but I guess that never occurred to him.

Looking back, I'm thinking Gazzara could have had a mark on me right from the start. I was riding the train down to Philly when he grabbed the seat to my left. He settled back, took out some ledger sheets and began marking them up with a short, sharp pencil. It's unusual for a white businessman to ride in the back car with the colored folk, but I didn't question it at the time; I was too busy enjoying the fact that somebody was willing to sit next to me. He seemed like a regular Joe College—all decked out in a fancy suit and polished leather shoes—except he had the face of a street urchin. A dark scar crossed his right earlobe, making it look as if it were caught in a slipknot. And his eyes were two different colors. The left one was brown—as dark as a chestnut—and the right one as green as a young blade of grass.

He'd only been sitting for a few minutes when he put down his ledger and started chatting me up. I'd heard his name before, so I wasn't surprised when he mentioned his operation. He said he was cranking out cases of moonshine made from beets. Sugar pop moon, he called it. Then he took out a flask and let me try some. Whatever he gave me was damned good stuff, far better than the street shine that's been making its way around Hell's Kitchen the past few months. This moon tasted better than our house whiskey; it was rich and smooth with a bite of rhubarb.

I didn't give it much thought. I didn't have to. I needed to stock the place and start pouring some booze or Jimmy would have me bussing tables again. I agreed to sixty dollars a case—nearly as much as Jimmy pays for his best liquor—and then I practically begged Gazzara to get me eighty cases before dawn.

His boys delivered to the Pour House at three o'clock in the morning. Santi and I each taste-tested a different bottle that we pulled from a random case. It was the same stuff I'd had on the train—Santi liked it, too—so I paid the runners. Not wanting to get busted by the Feds, we rushed the cases into the Pour House and stacked them by the bar. Then Santi and I lugged them downstairs, through the kitchen, and into the ratacombs one at a time, so nobody, especially not Denny's boys, would know where we kept the stash.

The runners must have known which bottles we would taste. The cases are probably flagged, but I don't bother searching for the marks. My albino eyes aren't worth a single bottle of this rotgut. I'd be lucky if all they did was shimmy back and forth, but they make the world look like a watercolor caught in a light mist. It doesn't matter—I don't need to read these labels to know there aren't many good bottles in the batch.

If I tell Jimmy I gave his cash to anybody but Owney Madden's goons I'm as good as dead. I've got to replace the shine or return the money before Jimmy gets back. My first thought is to hijack one of Madden's trucks and steal the booze, but I'd never get away clean—it wouldn't take Madden long to track down an albino smuggling a truckload of liquor.

I walk upstairs into the dining room. It's filling up and I need to start taking dinner orders, but I've got bigger fish to fry.

Santi pulls me next to the fireplace. “All of it's bogus?”

“Enough of it,” I say and look in on the bar. Everybody's happy. Two middle-aged drunks are singing along with the radio. “Body and Soul.” The redhead next to them is swaying in place, holding a martini in her hand. Life sure is easier when you're drinking booze and not serving it.

“You have to straighten this out,” Santi says.

Over Santi's shoulder, I see Larch smoking a cigarette and using his empty plate as an ashtray. I'd ask for his help but I don't need a cop, I need a miracle.

“And you have to start at the root of the circumstances,” Santi says.

I get that he's talking about Gazzara and he's right. To get Jimmy's money back I've got to shake the bastard down. And since Gazzara isn't coming up to the Pour House, I'm going to have to go down to Philadelphia and walk into his warehouse—in the middle of a town where my only protection, the name Jimmy McCullough, doesn't mean shit.

Like every other storefront in Harlem, the Hy-Hat Social Club is decorated for the holidays. Old Man Santiago must have spent the morning stringing lights around the window and hanging a glowing Santa face above the door. Inside, wreaths line the walls and red ribbons hang from the brass lights overhead.

I'm sitting with Santi at a booth in the dining room, trying to sort out Denny Gazzara's bait-and-switch. Through the double doors on my left, where four ping-pong tables are lined up, I can hear Old Man Santiago showing Billy Walker how to backhand a slam, which is a joke because the old man couldn't hit a lobbed grapefruit. The place is hopping; the bouncing ping-pong balls sound like Peg Leg Bates rattling the stage at the Cotton Club.

I started coming here when I was eighteen, a freshman at City College. I loved it from day one. I would show up after school to shoot pool and then come back after dinner to work with Old Man Santiago and Pearl in the kitchen. Nobody here ever seemed to notice I'm albino. In this place, I'm just another oddball.

It was a hot July weekend when Old Man Santiago told me he was shutting down the place for good. He was on his knees, cleaning out the inside of the icebox. A canvas work apron covered his flat chest and large belly; sweat lined his thick upper lip and soaked the wispy gray hairs on the top of his head. When he closed the icebox, his bony shoulders dropped and he sighed.

“There are other clubs, Jersey,” he said, measuring his words as if he were a father telling his son he was walking out on the family. “You'll move on from this place.”

I didn't get it, probably because I didn't want to get it. He seemed to have enough money to keep the place open; we all paid dues so we were never short on ping-pong paddles, pool cues, pop, hot dogs, whatever we wanted. It took Santi, who at the time was a twelve-year-old kid in knickers, to tell me that the dues barely covered the rent and his old man had been floating us with the little cash he had left over from his tailoring business. I guess Harlem wasn't missing enough buttons to keep things going. That's when I decided to help the old man out. He practically raised me—at least during the evening hours. I can't deny that once I found the Hy-Hat, I spent more time there than I did with my own father.

That next evening I threw on my nicest jacket, spit-shined my black oxfords, and took the subway to the Three Aces Restaurant in Hell's Kitchen to see Jimmy McCullough. I stood in front of him, my knees shaking inside my baggy pants, and told him I needed a job. Everybody up in Harlem knew what Jimmy did for a living. He'd show up every Sunday, walk from juice joint to juice joint, and collect bags of cash from the bar owners in exchange for hooking them up with bootleggers like Owney Madden. He was always decked out in a tailored suit and spats, his face clean-shaven and his short sideburns waxed into place. We'd never seen Jimmy raise his hands to anybody, and his droopy brown eyes could almost make him seem tired and innocent, but there was no question as to who pushed the buttons. At the time, I just figured that the poor suckers who got the brunt of Jimmy's stick deserved it.

“I'll hijack trucks, I'll do whatever it takes,” I told him, clasping my hands together and practically praying to him. He was my only hope at saving the Hy-Hat. “Just don't tell my father or Old Man Santiago.”

“I don't hijack trucks,” Jimmy said, standing in the glow of the neon sign in front of the Three Aces, swigging from a bottle of cherry soda. “It's distasteful.” As the last word came out, his lips, blood red from the pop, twisted with disgust.

He brought me into the restaurant, which was more crowded than the A train on a weekday morning. He had his own booth in the back; its padded red upholstery was so new it smelt like a freshly oiled baseball glove. He ordered me a cola and gave me a short lecture on how to be an upstanding outlaw. Being Jimmy, he also had the balls to give me advice on being a respectable albino.

“I don't care how white you are, you're still a nigger,” he said, looking me over and shaking his head. “You know that, right?” He waited for an answer. “You know you're a nigger.”

I wanted a job, so I nodded enthusiastically.

“That's right,” he said, almost as if he needed to be sure himself. “You're a nigger.” He spread some butter on a hunk of bread, bit into it, and kept talking as he chewed. “The cops don't like coons. And they won't give a buffalo shit that those splotches on your fucked-up face are as white as Sister Hannigan's ass.”

I laughed because I thought it was funny—at least the part about Sister Hannigan—but I've since found out that Jimmy always talks about Sister Hannigan's ass, or her tits, or, when he's really riled, her twat. Maybe she taught him in grammar school or something.

“You better smile if you even sniff a cop. Kiss their asses with those pink mambo lips of yours.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, my knees still shaking under the table but a smile stretching the corner of my mouth. If he was telling me how to duck the cops, he was going to give me work.

“I'll tell you something, kid,” he said. “Those bleached nuts of yours must be the size of coconuts for you to come down here and ask for work. You wanna work for me, you're welcome to it. But let me tell you something. If you ever think about screwing me for as much as one red cent, I'll kill you in ways you can't imagine.”

That night he gave me a loaded snub-nosed revolver, a pair of brass knuckles, and a grunt job at a watering hole behind a butcher shop on Ninth Avenue. For months, I'd hurry out of class and roll kegs in and out of the stock room. He paid me well, so it wasn't long before I'd quit college, come clean to my father, and found my own place to live. The Feds eventually shut down the bar, but I'm still working for Jimmy and still using the money to keep the Hy-Hat in ping-pong balls and ice cream cones. And I've never stopped smiling my pink ass off whenever I cross paths with a cop.

Tonight the Hy-Hat is as busy as ever and I'm in the back booth. The kids keep this table open for me because it doesn't have a reading lamp. My eyes are grateful.

I lean against the wooden backrest, which rises two feet above my shoulders. The table is littered with pretzel salt and I make a mental note to tell Old Man Santiago to be sure the kids wipe the place down after closing time. I suck some pop and wait for Santi to answer me.

“What's my move in Philly?” I ask him again. I don't want to drag him into my mess, but a chess champ has got to be better than I'd be at planning this out. “I figure I'll make a ruckus. If I can rile him up, maybe he'll start looking for me.”