Life and Death of a Tough Guy (7 page)

On a sparkling August morning, the two kids headed for the Weehawken ferry at the foot of Forty-Second Street. With only the West Side sparrows chirping them a farewell song, they walked off the street — the street of the Badgers — into the USA.

The continent swallowed them as it swallowed all its fugitives. Draft dodgers still on the dodge, soldiers homeless after the war, hoboes and bindlestiffs, all the highball wonders and freight car marvels.

The continent shuttled them up and down on its iron miles and good riddance too, while it went about its business, which that year included a little joker called the Volstead Act. Congress passed the Act and Prohibition moved out of the fat dictionary to become a new household word: the word with a dozen meanings. To the politicians, prohibition meant votes; to the pious old WCTU ladies, it was a vision of God with a glass of root beer in His hand; to the old-time brewers and whiskey distillers, it spelled bankruptcy or readjustment depending on how realistic they were. To the gangsters in the big cities, it would be the luckiest of lucky rabbit feet. Prohibition! With it they would kick open the door behind which the big dough was waiting.

“I smell money,” the Spotter said when the saloons closed down in January 1920, and he’d grinned like a pale and half-starved cat left by mistake in a fish store.

The Badgers had been limping along on a little holdup money, a little whore money, a little gambling money. This prohibition was a gold rush! In the first wild days with every second man in town peddling alky and every second cop finding out how good it was to have his palm greased regularly, Spotter Boyle and Clip Haley opened their first speakeasy. Within three months, they were operating close to a dozen speaks, making their own gin and cutting the honest stuff. Five hundred bucks bought a still that could make fifty to a hundred gallons a day. Since the government permitted the manufacture and sale of industrial alcohol, what was to stop an up-and-coming bootlegger from hiring himself a chemist to extract the undrinkable elements such as wood alky? Since near beer was legal, and the only way to make near beer was to make real beer and then remove the alcohol, what was to stop an up-and-coming beer baron from seeing to it that the alky wasn’t removed?

Wild days, with everybody in town breaking an ankle to get on the pie-wagon. A shot of bootleg whiskey fetched as high as a buck, and even at two bits the speakeasy prop wasn’t losing. All the loss was in the customer’s pocketbook, not to mention his stomach.

“Seven’s my lucky number,” Clip Haley had tootled when he and the Spotter opened their seventh speak. Clip’d bought a box of cigars and, drunk as a coot, he skipped up and down Eighth Avenue, passing the stogies out free to every cop he bumped into. Afterwards, when the Spotter’d asked him, “How come?” Clip explained fuzzily about cheap grafters. The Spotter left him alone, and Clip, with money to burn and two or three dames holding the match for him, was a hundred percent satisfied.

The Spotter watched Clip’s antics with a cold eye. The trouble with Clip, the Spotter thought as he lay sleeplessly in his room at the Hotel Berkeley where he’d just moved, was that Clip was still a rough-housing Badger at heart, okay with the fists, but not so good on the headwork.

In his dark hotel room, the Spotter would grin mockingly at his doctor’s advice to relax. Yeh, relax. Okay, so he wasn’t touching a drop of booze and the Ziegeld Follies could march naked into his bedroom without getting more than a whistle from him. So he was in bed by midnight, okay, okay, okay. But tell that to the Bum Ticker, the Spotter thought. Someone had to do the headwork. How many quarts of whiskey were needed for the speak on Thirty-Ninth? For the speak on Forty-First? On Forty-Second, Forty-Fifth, Forty-Eighth? How much whiskey, gin, beer? How was their supply? With ten speaks operating, that meant a payroll of close to thirty guys. That meant figuring payroll money besides booze money and protection money.

By the fourth month of prohibition, the Spotter knew he had to get himself a partner if he didn’t want to put down a deposit on a coffin. So when Tom Quinn, the ex-saloon-keeper, approached him, the Spotter who wasn’t superstitious thought, “Somebody must care about my lousy ticker.”

He couldn’t have found a better man. Quinn had come over from Ireland in the steerage, swung a pick and shovel, worked himself up to a bartender with a handlebar mustache, saved his money to become the owner of a gild-edge saloon on Eighth Avenue. With prohibition, Tom Quinn had temporarily retired to see as he put it, “How the wind was blowin’.”

“You an’ me, Spotter,” the ex-saloon-keeper declared, “Can make ourself a good penny. Every Tom, Dick and Harry’re makin’ an easy penny but the lion’s share’ll go into the pockets of the boys with the connections. All we want’s our share of the Kitchen.”

It was one big Hell’s Kitchen, five avenues wide, with Twelfth Avenue fronting on the Hudson River, then Eleventh, Tenth, Ninth and Eighth Avenues, the sidestreets numbered as regularly as the avenues. Over on Seventh Avenue, the wreckers were carting away the tenements, twenty-story garment lofts rising on the rubble; a building boom to match the drinking boom, with Broadway the drinking headquarters for a whole nation. “Broadway, we won’t even try to break into,” Tom Quinn said to the Spotter. “All we wants our share of the Kitchen and that won’t be no leadpipe cinch neither.” For there was Ownie Madden bootlegging, and Ownie had for a lawyer a slim good-looking smart Irishman by name of Jimmy Walker: that same Jimmy would be elected Mayor of New York. Arrested fifty-seven times, Ownie’d broken parole fifty-seven times and the wise boys down the West Side said with a wink that there must be two kinds of parole. “One kind the coppers hound you all the time. The other kind’s the Ownie Madden kind with the coppers kissing your ass and thanking you for the honor.” Besides Ownie, there was Larry Fay and Waxey Gorden and Big Bill Dwyer, the exlongshoreman: that same Big Bill would get to be the biggest bootlegger in the whole country for a while, with offices on Lexington Avenue, with a corruptions department in charge of paying off old friends and influencing new ones, a traffic department with experts in trucks and speedboats, a police department where bullets kept the chisellers in line.

Wild days! The old-time gangs moved wholesale into bootlegging. Mugs who thought Chile came in bottles became authorities on St. Pierre and Miquelon off Newfoundland from where the whiskey boats sailed to anchor off the Long Island and Jersey coasts. The bootleggers landed their whiskey, transferred it to trucks and if they weren’t hijacked — that was a new word too — they had themselves a truckload of dough. If they were hijacked, they could recoup with somebody else’s whiskey. NEW BOOTLEGGER KILLING, the papers reported, while a thirsty nation growled: “Whose business is it anyway if a man wants a drink on Saturday night?”

The Spotter and his new partner Tom Quinn doubled their speaks in Hell’s Kitchen. Quinn knew the politicians, he knew the cops and he took over the job of keeping everybody happy. A fiver took care of the cop in the street, a tenner satisfied the sergeant, a captain had to have a weekly C-note and a fed had to be inhuman to resist a cool grand. Every few months the plainclothes lads were switched around, but the new men flew to the easy money with the instinct of homing pigeons. “I’ve got to make a pinch,” Quinn’s friends among the feds would confide in the most confidential of whispers, “so get yourself ready.” And Quinn’d speak to the Spotter who would order his boys to drag a bum off the street.

“Any bum. Shave the bastid, stick him in a clean suit and bring ‘m up this flat on Forty-Fourth.”

The bum would become the owner, the raid’d come off, the feds’d get their man, and the owner’d become a bum again with plenty of time in the clink to mull over the mistakes of a lifetime.

“It pays to be smart,” all the smart boys agreed as they communed with their souls which, like their cash, they kept snug and safe in their wallets.

• • •

“The speakeasy’s here to stay like your whorehouse,” the cinderbed prophets preached in the hobo jungles as Joey listened. “If you stiffs was smart, which you ain’t or you wouldn’t be stiffs, you’d be highballin’ to L.A or Chicago and get yourself on the gravy train.”

“The Spotter must be in it,” Joey had said to Georgie. “Bet he sent us six telegrams to come back only the shacks tore ‘em up.”

Georgie didn’t go for this kind of talk, staring uneasily like a faithful dog at the sullen-faced kid with the gray eyes.

Joey’d had plenty of time for thinking on the road. He knew now what the Spotter’d meant about being tough and smart. He’d been smart to holler out the name of Johnny Murtagh, but dumb when he’d given the sheenies his real name, and even dumber telling the Spotter what’d happened. A real smart guy would’ve kept his big trap shut. Yeah! Being tough was no good without being smart. And there was no depending on luck, Joey brooded. Luck could be sliced two ways, good or bad. His luck’d been bad when that damn sheeny’d popped in out of nowhere to spoil the stickup. That was when a guy had to be smart when the luck was n.g. He’d been smart, but not smart enough, and this hoboing was the dumbest of the dumb.

“We oughta go home,” Joey began urging Georgie.

“We ain’t seen everything yet,” Georgie’d protested.

Joey’d smiled. Georgie’s brains must be drying up, he’d thought. Christ, what was there to see? More railroad yards, more railroad bulls?

They turned east in May, panhandled in Dallas, fought off five jockos in a St. Louis flop who wanted their white skin, stole a suitcase in Chicago whose contents fetched a dollar and a half at a hockshop, paid over that same dollar and a half to a South Side bootlegger for a pint without a label described as “real Canadian whiskey.” That was hoboing for you, Joey thought in the clackety freights, everything happening and nothing happening, and he’d been doing it close to a year. Christ, about time he became smart. Like the Spotter!

• • •

YOUNG DEMOCRATS CLUB, the sign said. It was a big sign stretching clear across four windows on the second floor of a tenement in Fortieth Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. From inside an upholstery shop on the ground floor, the upholsterer squinted at the two kids out on the sidewalk looking up at the sign. A hulking kid and a kid with shaggy dark blond hair, wearing hockshop specials for coats. The upholsterer hadn’t ever seen this pair before, but he cursed them anyway and cursed the club above his store, and prohibition that’d brought the club, and the whole country that was going to the dogs.

Georgie pointed up at the YOUNG DEMOCRATS sign. “What the hell’s that?”

“Nothin’. They’re the same old Badgers. Only with a different name,” Joey assured him. “Don’t you worry Georgie. The Spotter’ll roll out the red carpet.”

The street was darkening, the first lights blinking yellow, and Georgie felt about as big as the coins in his pocket where a lonely quarter was rubbing against a thinner dime. Georgie felt like thirty-five cents, no more, no less. “Red carpet,” Georgie muttered. “Don’t be such a wise guy — ”

“Green carpet then,” Joey retorted and asked himself what he was waiting for. A half hour ago, at Brenner’s pool parlor, an old Badger hangout, they’d met some of the guys who’d given them the lowdown. How the gang was rolling in four-leaf clovers these days, how Clip Haley’d been found with a bullet through the back of his head, how Tom Quinn’d stepped into Clip’s shoes. “Frig ‘em!” Joey said and he walked toward the vestibule.

They went up to the second floor. The voices of the Young Democrats seemed to break out from behind the closed door to come on the run to meet them. They stepped into a room full of faces half of whom they didn’t know from a hole in the ground, with even the old Badger faces on the strange side.

“Hey, Bug, wanna see somethin’?” Billy Muhlen hollered at the sight of them.

Georgie and Joey smiled as only hoboes can smile at the faces in a crowd they hope won’t yell for the cops. Billy Muhlen shook hands with them. But Bughead Moore, a grin as cold as a railroad bull’s on his lips, ordered the Badgers to back up. What for? they wanted to know, and he told them, grinning. “I’m the street cleanin’ inspector.” He was wearing a light blue suit that did everything but scream. He inspected the kids’ broken shoes and ragged coats, announcing to his audience, “Yuh can see they pulled up in the flea express!”

Georgie laughed with the others, but Joey couldn’t even force a smile to his lips. “The Spotter in?” he asked.

“Look who wants the Spotter!” Bughead clowned. “They think all they haffta do is show their maps.” He sniffed at Georgie. “Here yuh got a flea what’s a mick flea, and this one here’s one of them kosher fleas….”

Kosher…
. Almost he’d forgotten. On the road, that secret mark branded on his heart had faded in the hammering of wheel on rail. Christ, Joey thought, he’d been away all right and the friggen Bug was king of the hill. “We wanna see Spotter and not his errand boy,” he said, not caring now if he was dumb or smart, answering with his heart, with his blood, in a fury that drained the color out of his cheeks.

The color he had lost washed, so it seemed, onto Bughead’s reddening face. “Okay, jewboy,” Bughead jeered. “Come back at ten yuh wanna see the Spotter, but don’t bring no rabbi.”

This time Joey controlled himself.

At the Forty-Second Street Automat, they spent Georgie’s thirty-five cents on two pots of Boston baked beans, and bread and butter and coffee. They stayed on awhile. When the manager eyed them, they left in a hurry, losing themselves in the Times Square crowd. Georgie, still hungry, said they should’ve dumped a bottle of catsup into a bowl of hot water — hot water for tea was free at the Automat — and had themselves some tomato soup. Joey answered he wouldn’t wash his feet in that kind of tomato soup and besides the Spotter wouldn’t let them down.

They were back at the club before ten. A card game was on, the smoke of cigarettes winding in broken bluish chains between the players and the hangers-on. Bughead, without a word, led them out of the front room into a corridor over to a closed door. He knocked, and the last they saw of him was his grin floating behind as if disembodied.