The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (9 page)

But Royce Wilmington and the brothers—the three actually were brothers: Ed, Fred and Ted Lincoln or Jefferson, one of those—were not there to prove a point, except that they had been well briefed on what to bring on a
shiva
visit. Carrying in enough food for an army, they looked like the native bearers in the black-and-white Tarzan films I had seen Saturday mornings at the Loew’s Premier on Sutter Avenue, except a lot better dressed. “S’all kosher,” Royce said. “Y’all know the Second Avenue Delicatessen? Got a certificate right up there on the wall as you come in. Got everything there but the fruit—y’all don’t have kosher and not kosher fruit, do you?”

These were big men, and so expensively got up they seemed to present a tableau, a kind of staged negritude that declared in no uncertain terms
We is here
. That was unfair, of course, because transliterating their Southern dialect consistently would call for doing the same for Shushan’s, for Del’s, for mine. All of us had grown up with a license to torture the mother tongue, each in his own way. Besides, these four had been speaking their particular form of English, if we include their forebears, for hundreds of years. The four white men in the room—though Ira-Myra’s rarely spoke and at that only in a rumbling whisper—were all first- or second-generation Americans. If anyone had an American pedigree, it was Royce and the brothers, whose silken patois was on the record in
Huckleberry Finn
itself, and on every blues recording for fifty years.

“Y’all sit on a box, is that it?” Royce said.

“Some Jews sit on the floor,” I said.

Royce looked hard at me, as if to ask,
Who you, boy
? He fingered the knot of his white tie, which pushed out on a collar pin from his pink shirt like a signal flag. His suit, cut long and lean, was charcoal with a soft pink stripe. The others were dressed with similar pizzazz: everything of the highest quality, everything custom, everything matching—though none of this would be found downtown until decades later, when white men felt they too could be peacocks. The uniform of the brotherhood of black gangsters was simply this: if we can’t be equal in all other matters, we’re going to be a whole lot better dressed.

“It’s a sign of mourning,” Del said. He put out his hand and introduced himself.

“Del’s a professor,” Shushan said with evident pride. “Also a poet.”

“No shit,” Royce said, quite as though he had been introduced to a Martian. “How you get to be that?”

“You bullshit your way through three degrees,” Del said. “Then you bullshit your way up the ladder in various universities, more or less job-shopping, until you’ve gone pretty much as far as you can go. Then you keep on doing the same thing, teaching, writing, teaching. Before too long you’re dead.”

This speech seemed to hit its mark. The room was silent. Even Ira in his mastiff spot by the door shared our embarrassment and discomfiture. As one all four of the new guests pulled cigarettes out of their pockets, Kool filters to a man, and as one paused to look to Shushan, who said, “Sure, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.”

Little was said while the four lit up, drew deeply and exhaled smoke rings that formed as if eternal, then dissipated into the air until the vapors reformed at the ceiling, creating a kind of proximate heaven, a room-size cloud. The menthol itself must have burned off. All that remained was the familiar stink of cigarettes that, like the exhaust fume of burnt gasoline or the assault of perfume in a crowded elevator or the summer stench of melting asphalt was only another pot-holed item on the city’s olfactory menu. Like the clang of the early-morning garbage trucks and the threatening rattle of traffic, the screaming-soprano subway trains, the staccato of approaching high heels, it was part of the sensual symphony in which I had grown up, and which I little understood. There was so much to it, so many pieces, so many individual parts, it was impossible to understand how it all worked, or could. One thing was certain: however the city functioned, these men were what made it work. For the first time I heard Shushan speak more than a few lines at a time. The subject, which somehow had arisen in the time I was examining the cloud on the ceiling, was the Fulton Fish Market, then located on a truly smelly spot where way-downtown met the East River. The market would later be relocated to the Bronx, thus freeing up valuable real estate for the stock brokers and bankers who would be buying condos on the site and dining in restaurants serving fresh fish that had once been sold wholesale on the same blocks.

“The
goombahs
want in,” he said. “But they’ll kill it. Okay, someone has to be in charge. Without someone in charge, every cheap chiseler with a knife in his pocket or a baseball bat under his coat could stop the whole business. You got six hundred vendors in the market. Five thousand people employed. That’s directly. But you got to look further. If you consider the truckers who bring the fish to the restaurants, the restaurants themselves, the retail fish markets themselves, the Chinese restaurants that don’t serve alleycat, it’s gotta be a hundred thousand people easy. Who’s gonna protect them? The cops? I pay the cops myself a lot of money. Somebody else might pay them the same to let chaos reign. Hey, and what about the guys on the fishing boats and their families? The market doesn’t work they don’t. Now we got a situation where we could have chaos just because the
goombahs
don’t have enough on their greasy plates—excuse me, Del, we’re not talking about all Italians here—but
these
Italians, they like chaos. Chaos is good for their business.”

“Amen,” Royce said in the rumbling bass that through the fifties could be heard on every rhythm-and-blues song recorded in America, and on many street corners as well. He was joined by the brothers, who came in all together, a living doo-wop.

“You’re saying a dictator is what America needs?” I said to Shushan. “We don’t need to elect a president, just a Hitler?”

“You’re calling me a Hitler?”

“You could be one if you wanted. You could squeeze the fish market until it croaked. If you wanted to.”

“Which would get me exactly what, junior?”

“Okay, maybe the next dictator isn’t as smart as you. Hitler destroyed the Jews, who made Germany’s economy. Stalin killed off his Jews, and the peasants, and even his own secret police.”

“They knocked their own proposition,” Shushan said. “If I did that I’d be diselected.”

“By who?”

“By everybody. It wouldn’t be tolerated. The mob—the papers call it that because they don’t understand it, as if it’s this fucking single-minded club, like the Elks or something—is just a lot of guys that
facilitate
. You know that word, college boy? They facilitate. Without us everything would stop.”

“Yeah,” I said. From the beginning I felt total confidence in speaking my mind. Shushan and his kind were ass-kissed day and night. They respected when someone spoke straight. Unless he spoke to the cops. “Without organized crime there wouldn’t be gambling, hookers, drugs.”

“Yeah? So what’s wrong with that. Each one of those is just commerce. You know what there’d be? Disorganized crime.”

“But what you do is still crime, right?”

“Exactly. When there was prohibition it was a crime to make, transport, even drink booze. One day in 1933 it was suddenly not a crime. In Russia it’s a crime to buy a sack of potatoes for three rubles and sell it for four, even though you took the time and trouble to truck it to Moscow from some farm, then stand in the freezing cold and sell it one fucking potato at a time. In America that’s not a crime, it’s a requirement. In most places it’s a crime to marry more than one broad; in dozens of countries you got an option for four. In some countries if you as much as suspect your wife is stepping out on you it’s okay to kill her just like that. In other countries you get the chair. Look, there are certain things that ain’t ethical, and maybe we can agree shouldn’t be done. You shouldn’t rape a broad. It’s wrong. But in some countries you do it and they reward you with a wedding with the same dame. There’s Albanians in the Bronx, that’s how they get married. They been in America fifty years and they’re still kidnapping brides, raping them and then there’s a ceremony and it’s all grins and
l’chaims
. Still, it’s a crime. But it’s also a crime to kill your old man, right? But what if your old man is beating the shit out of your old lady—what then? All these things, Russy, they’re very subjunctive. Me, all I know is I try to play fair, give value and pay my taxes like a good American.”

Much nodding ensued. The brothers were clearly enthused the same way that people get lumps in their throats when they see the flag, or at the movies when the good guy finally overcomes. I looked to my professor for a bit of perspective, if not outright cynicism, but he was busily pouring out more shots and clinking glasses with men who under different circumstances would just as soon cut his throat in the street.

“This has been a public service message,” I said in my best radio announcer tone, “from the people who gave you Murder Inc., union racketeering and a surcharge on every truck that enters or leaves Manhattan.”

The brothers turned to me. As usual, they let Royce speak. “You confusing me, little man,” he said. “First you at the funeral and talking like you be family. Then you sitting down with me and the brothers and the chinks after a funeral and sharing lobster lo-mein and what-not. Now you tight amongst us and being shocked by what you know be just the way of the world. You know it be, don’t you?”

“I know it is.”

“Then why you be
pro
-testing it? You got to go along to get some. Where we be if every weekday you got someone talking about busting up the system that took so long to get built up in the first place? Answer me that, young friend?”

“We’d be in fucking Mississippi, and people like you would be trying to ride a bus or sit at a lunch counter, and the cops would have dogs on you.”

Silence. The brothers looked at me, looked at Shushan, glanced at Del, then back to me—in unison.

“Kid’s right,” Shushan said quietly. “On that one he is one hundred ten percent right. Sometimes the system works, sometimes it don’t. You gentlemen with Dr. King? You believe in the struggle?”

“Hell yes,” Royce said. “Hell yes we do and amen. But that be happening far away, thank the Lord, and that the reason we here, because we be there we be on the wrong end of that po-lice dog, for sure.”

The brothers grinned at this in self-satisfaction.

Shushan cut them off. “Frankly, Royce. Fred. Teddy. Ed. I’m not proud to hear you say that.”

“Well, what you want us to do, go down there and fight the entire Ku Klux Klan, including the po-lice? Man, my mama and daddy come up here to be free from that shit, and every morning I in New York I thank the Lord they did.”

“So you’re just going to let that happen to your own people?” Shushan said.

“Shee-it, they be my own people like the Africans over in Africa be my own people. Yeah, they look like me, maybe they talk like me, but they ain’t me. They just foolish fucking niggers ain’t got sense to leave that place and come north.”

“Would a runaway nigger run south?” It was Del.

“Wazzat?”

“I said,
Would a runaway nigger run south?
That’s a direct quote from the story of Huckleberry Finn, gentlemen. You ought to read it. It’s about a slave who runs away and figures he has a pretty good chance of putting the slavers off his trail if he goes in the wrong direction.”

“You calling me nigger or what?”

Del put down his drink and smiled like a man who had nothing to lose, always a scary moment. “I’m calling on you to do something about what’s happening to your people.
I’m
going down to Mississippi. Half the white students I deal with
they’re
going down to Mississippi. Let me put it to you straight, Mr. Royce. Either you march for your people or you march against them.”

From the corner of my eye I could see Ira-Myra’s come alert, the dog in him sensing violence. I looked to Shushan, but he maintained the same evenly beatific pose, his face relaxed, his shoulders down, his hands in his lap.

“You hear this dago fool call me a nigger, Mr. Cats? You hear this pro-fessor say that?” Royce turned to the brothers. “Y’all hear that?” As one they nodded. Royce turned back to Shushan. “Here we come to pay our respects. We bringing enough food for ten funerals. We dress to impress. We sincere friends. And we get this nigger talk. Man, I hope you can put this poetry man in his place, because if you don’t there going to be four insulted niggers right here.” He reconsidered. “Afro-Americans.”

Shushan got up slowly from his crate, walked slowly around the couch the black brothers were seated upon, and stood before their leader. Without a word he bent low and kissed the man on his cheek. Then, soundlessly, he kissed each of the brothers the same way. “Professor del Vecchio didn’t mean an insult,” he said quietly. “I can vouch for this man. He’s good people. All he means is that it’s time for all you Afro-American black jiveass nigger jigaboos to hang together, otherwise you are going to hang separately. You know who said that? Benjamin Franklin, that’s who. Signed the Declaration of Independence, practically discovered electricity and wasn’t a bad writer himself. You and me we all know what’s going on down there. Maybe it
is
time you got off your fat black asses and went to the aid of your people. They getting whupped pretty good, as Mark Twain might say—don’t you think they could use some
un
whuppin’?”

Through the long evening, as the gangsters swapped stories and Del recited poems and food and drink were indulged in to an extent that could only be called biblical, I understood something that I had missed only hours before: I had fallen for Terri Cats not least because I loved her brother. I loved him more two days later, the last day of the mourning period, when the brothers Callinan reentered my life with a vengeance—not theirs, Shushan’s.

This is not the way to Chinatown, I thought from the middle seat of the red Eldorado as Ira-Myra’s pointed it uptown. Maybe I had seen too many gangster movies, but when a certain kind of person takes another person for a ride and it is clear they are traveling in the wrong direction, it’s just as clear that something untoward may occur. I put this out of my mind. Why would Shushan want to knock me off? Hell, I didn’t know why Shushan did anything, though I did suspect there was a reason for everything he did do. But this clearly was not Chinatown. Shushan had been talking all day about getting a decent Chinese meal to close out the mourning period—it was the one thing we had not ordered in because, he said, Chinese places on the Upper East Side were, in his own word, “deracinated.” How he knew the word was at least as much a mystery as how he knew, a couple of decades before anyone else did, one Chinese cuisine from another, and how he knew enough to determine what was or was not deracinated within it. Seated to my right, Shushan had not said a word since we had entered the car. It was his first day out of the hotel room, his first shave, his first glance in a mirror. For that matter, though I’d gone for a stroll every day to pick up the papers, it was pretty much my first real outing as well. Having shared his mourning, I now shared his relief at its conclusion. On the radio the Four Seasons were blasting: