The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (12 page)

He was some sort of Latin, probably Puerto Rican, with that mixed-blood look, Spanish, Indian, black, maybe even a little Chinese, that seemed to demand the suspension of judgment of others because so much otherness was part of him. “I hear you did good for the
shiva
too,” he said.
“Chinga
son-of-a-bitch wouldn’t let me come to that. No spicks allowed.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Shushan said. “For the funeral and the shiva he was taking his family on vacation to Puerto Rico. I mean, scheduled for a year. What was he supposed to tell his kids—I can’t go because my boss’s mother passed? Anyway, spicks have to go back there once a year, just to visit the hubcaps they stole in New York.”

The street was misty from the rain, the light soft as it can be only when broken up by so many humans pulsing through the streets, the streets themselves alive with the commerce of fruit and vegetable stores open until midnight, seafood markets with the fish laid out like volunteer corpses, so pleased to greet you on their icy beds, a Chinese apothecary looking like a supermarket for clientele that was a whole other species, its dusty display window full of dried spiders, eviscerations of embalmed bats, and strange fleshy plants that seemed to be growing upside down in pots hanging from the ceiling; in a place of honor a large coiled snake, banded in black and red, moved slightly as though reacting to a dream, then settled back into mimicry of the dead. Tiny storefront restaurants were lined up like troughs on this side of the street; on the other were four-story tenements and the police station.  Shushan led us to the one restaurant with the mixed menagerie turning on spits in the window where, once inside, the rotisseurs in stained white uniforms and white forage caps greeted him with a familiarity that to me was effusive, exaggerated, surreal. Shushan returned the favor by shaking hands with all three countermen, who hastily wiped their red-stained hands on their aprons—each might have been indicted on murder charges based solely on apparel. “How you doin’?” Shushan said to each.
“Tzing-tao!”
Each in turn shouted back
“Tzing-tao!”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” Shushan said. “But they say it all the time. Probably it’s
fuck you
. Looks like we came at rush hour.”

There was not a seat in the house. All of Chinatown seemed to have been compressed into this one restaurant, whose twenty or so tables held nearly a hundred people so squeezed together that raising chopsticks could be considered an act of aggression. The waiters physically forced themselves between the backs of chairs. One of them got to the front, repeating the whole
Tzing-tao!
routine with Shushan.

“Table for four,” the waiter said. “One minute.” He turned toward the kitchen where another waiter had already entered carrying a four-foot round table upside down on his head, followed by two more carrying a chair the same way. Our guy, obviously in charge, began barking in Chinese to the occupants of three tables in the middle of the room. They merely shook their heads. He shouted again. The waiters remained standing with the furniture over them. More shouting.

“Hey, we can wait,” Shushan said.

“You no wait. They finish. They finish, they go.”

As we watched the diners rush through their meals under the furniture poised above their heads, a bottle of Johnny Walker Black appeared in the hand of the headwaiter, who poured drinks for us as we stood. In three minutes one of the tables with two diners was abandoned, that table lifted out of the way and the larger table descended into its place with much shoving of the surrounding diners. The two new chairs were inserted at the table, a red cloth was unfurled and settled on the raw plywood top. Table settings mysteriously appeared.

“Now you eat,” the headwaiter said.

And eat we did. Despite the red-drenched meats in the window the specialty of the place turned out to be fish, plus seafood in all its bizarre variety. Everything seemed to be bathed in red sauce studded with bits of emerald green or dark brown or pink, all shimmering under the fluorescent lights.

“You know this stuff, kid? This is Hunan food. Southwest China. Think of Texas. Very spicy, but not sweet unless it’s combined with something else, like salty or sour. Your American Chinese food is Guadong, which is what people call Cantonese, because Canton is where most of the immigrants from China come from. But Hunan is not just hot like Schezuan. Take fish. The idea of the sauces in Hunan food is to reveal the taste of the fish, not conceal it. And this is good fish—you can’t get fresher unless you’re a shark.”

“Shushan is the king of fish in New York,” Justo said. “You want fish, you go to the Kingfish. He da Kingfish.”

“Yeah, I da Kingfish,” Shushan said. “You like this fish, kid? Any kind of fish you like, just ask me.”

“The
chingao
Itals are waiting for Shushan to go away,” Justo said. “They got a good feeling about what’s going to happen to my man, but it’s not gonna happen. Nothing gonna happen. We gonna get through the
chingao
trial and we gonna keep what we got.”

I was scooping a succulent morsel of striped bass in some sort of scallion-heavy maroon sauce that allowed the flavor of the fish through only to strike the tongue with fire, when I realized I was being invited into the conversation. “Which is?”

“The Fulton Fish Market, kid,” Shushan said. “Our
gavone
friends are looking to come in, maybe during my trial even, but for sure if I go away. We don’t even know if they’re behind the whole thing, the indictment etcetera etcetera, because one thing about the
goombah
mentality, they see something in the hands of a kike or a spick or a mick or a nigger even and they want it, so they figure out who to get on the case. They’re like jackals in Africa, they lead the lion to the prey and then wait until the big cat takes it down, a wildebeest or a zebra or whatever, and then they try to get the fresh kill away from the lion. It’s nature, that’s all.”

“They want what we got,” Justo said.

“I make it work,” Shushan said. “I make it friendly. I’m like the big cop on the beat, the big mick cop who used to walk a beat in every neighborhood in the city, but now they ride around by twosies in patrol cars because they’re too scared to step out. One thing about those mick cops when I was a kid, they walked the beat. You didn’t fuck with them. Now there’s no order in the whole city. When you get that in a place like the Fulton Fish Market, which has been supplying the city with seafood since over two hundred years, you get chaos. Somebody says, ‘Hey, nobody moves as much as a bay scallop until I get paid to let it happen,’ it causes two kinds of trouble. The first kind is bad scallops. The stuff comes in the night, it has to go out in the early morning, at the worst. Sometimes you’re looking at a turnaround of twenty minutes—comes in, goes out. One minute it’s on the boat, next it’s on a truck, then it’s at the market and bim-bam thank you sam it’s out the door in somebody’s pick-up truck off to some retail market in Queens or uptown to your fancy restaurants—”

“Or here,” I said, understanding.

“Or here. Funny thing, sometimes you get striper caught in the Great South Bay, out on Long Island, it goes to the market a couple hours’ drive away and then somebody with a restaurant only a couple of miles from where it was boated puts it on the menu. You can’t have something as delicate as this disturbed, because fish, in case you never noticed, really stinks when it’s not fresh. Yeah, there are things you can do to clean up the smell, but fresh is fresh. The restaurant chefs aren’t fools so they won’t touch it, the neighborhood markets, they won’t screw their regular customers because that’s how they get regular customers. But unless there’s somebody looking out for the little guy, some
gavone
is going to come in and say, ‘
Bona sera
, I want mine.’ Everywhere you look they come in for the kill on the weak and the vulnerable. It’s like a nuclear bomb. You don’t even have to use it—just having it is enough. They got the trash business for the same reason. You don’t move the trash you got major headaches, rats, stench. Parking lots? You want the cars not broken up, pay up. Construction and demolition, don’t ask. They can slow things down so much they don’t have to do anything but show up and they get paid off. You know, I don’t like that Bobby Kennedy, but he’s right about the
goombahs
. They’re out of control.”

“And you’re Robin Hood, protecting the little guy.”

“Ruben Hood, yeah,” Shushan said. “Gentlemen, listen to this kid. He’s got stainless steel balls, no? Kid, you got stainless steel balls?”

“I don’t know, Shushan.”

“Don’t worry, you’re going to know. You’re going to learn more about yourself than you ever thought possible. That’s why I’m introducing you to Justo here. Justo and me, Justo and I you would correct me, we go way back.”

“We go back to Korea,” Justo said, seeming slowly to grow before my eyes. The light suit, dark shirt, light tie—actually some form of silver in the fluorescent light of the restaurant—the costume of the cartoon gangster, it all melted away: I saw the man. Justo’s thin face was pockmarked along the two ridges that formed a vee from ear to mouth. His short hair was slicked back with enough oil to grease Shushan’s Cadillac. And his dark somewhat oriental eyes were small and so close together they might have met were it not for the sliver of nose that shot directly out of the meeting of his brows. In short, no movie star. But in saying just that one word he seemed to be sitting straighter, his gaze steady, his face relaxed in appreciation. “Korea,” he said again. “This crazy fuck ever tell you about Korea?”

“I overheard him speaking of it to someone else.”

“Yeah,” Justo said. “
Chingao
, they didn’t know whether to court-martial him or give him the Navy Cross.” He smiled happily, almost prettily. He had good teeth, big and white, that seemed to have been borrowed from someone else’s face. “So you know what, they did both.”

“Ah,” Shushan said. “That wasn’t exactly the first time I was in court.”

“Except they wanted to put you in front of a firing squad,” Justo said. “When you was a tough kid in Brooklyn maybe you could get reform school, or even worse. But—”

“But nothing,” Shushan said. “So what I was saying is this: The
goombahs
, their whole life is living off others. I’m not talking about your normal Italians, Sicilian, Napolida, Abruzz—I’m talking about the kind of people they’re cockroaches. Their own people hate them, Russy—they suck the blood out of their own.”

“And what do you do, Shushan?”

“Me? Like I said, I’m just like the neighborhood cop, except I don’t take bribes and make a better paycheck. Anybody fucks with the Fulton Fish Market, anybody even looks like it, I’m all over them before you can say scrod, not even flounder or yellow-tail but fucking scrod. No make it cod, that’s even shorter. Which is why New York City gets the freshest fish, why people can go to work in the market and leave in the morning and nobody shakes them down, why the trucks roll in and out like a Swiss watch, like a Rolex or Omega.”

“So you’re some kind of benevolent despot,” I said, by now wondering if I did indeed have balls of stainless steel. “You think that’s American?”

“Fuck that,” Shushan said. “You’re going to learn you can’t do everything the right way, because of all the people who are ready to do it the wrong way. You’re just a kid, your nose is in books, and maybe you know a lot, but what you don’t know is that in the real world somebody has to make a decision every minute. Okay, sometimes you get the wrong somebody, and sometimes he doesn’t have the luxury of being democratically elected, but somebody has to step up.”

“You know who else got the Navy Cross, kid?” Justo said. “Barney Ross the Jewish boxer from Chicago.
Semper fi
all the way. And what’s his name, Sterling Hayden, the movie star? You’re sitting with royalty, kid.”

“Because you shot a man?”

“Yeah, well,” Shushan said as more food appeared. It was red duck from the rotisserie in front. Shushan waved gaily to the countermen, who waved back, grinning. “What happened was we were in a tight spot, and somebody had to make a fucking decision. So I did. That’s all it was.” He looked across the table and changed the subject. “Ira, you going to leave some of this food for other people?”

Whatever else was said over the meal remains a blur. The Scotch must have gotten to me—despite Shushan’s reservations about
ganj
, I was a pot-smoker, not a drinker. Then, as we were finishing up, two elegantly dressed Chinese in metallic silk suits and white-on-white shirts came up and shook everyone’s hand. Tables were again shoved aside so they could sit. Unlike the older Chinese at the graveside, these spoke perfect New York English—Jimmy was the voluble one; Tommy barely said a word—and seemed to think they had found a long-lost brother. They were obviously sports fans, immediately talking intense boxing and baseball and which college teams would make it to the National Invitational Tournament at Madison Square Garden. In something of an alcohol and Hunan haze, I pretended to be interested, perking up only when I was introduced well into the conversation, as though Shushan had abruptly realized he had left me out.

“This is Russy, my associate,” Shushan told them. “Any time he needs a hand, I hope you’ll treat him well.”

Neither Justo nor Ira was introduced, either because they were known to the visitors or because they did not matter. Why I mattered was a mystery, one which I had already come to regard with the acceptance of an orphan who is taken in by relatives he never knew he had.

When we walked outside into the November night the twenty was still on the windshield, and the car was freshly washed, its deep crimson paint glowing like a Red Delicious apple beneath the street lamps. I may actually have dozed on the trip to Brooklyn, the chattering grates of the Manhattan Bridge lulling me as the big Caddy rumbled smoothly over the metal, Symphony Sid, the jazz disk jockey, on the radio, so that when we got to my apartment house on Eastern Parkway I was still drowsy as I staggered past my wrecked Plymouth Belvedere, the poor thing stripped of its wheels like a quadruple amputee.