Life and Death of a Tough Guy (8 page)

Spotter Boyle smiled when they entered. He was sitting at a roll-top desk in a small room, once a bedroom, the walls painted green, with a gauze-draped Turkish beauty adorning the calendar of a bygone year. It was the same old Spotter, Joey thought with a relief so great he felt dizzy when the Spotter in a friendly voice asked what the trouble was with Bughead.

“I let’m get under my skin,” Joey admitted. “I was dead wrong, Spotter,” he whipped himself. “Just a sap. He said I was a kosher flea so I got sore and called him an errand boy.”

The Spotter lit a cigarette and then offered the pack to the two kids. “Hoboin’ didn’t hurt you guys,” he said. “You look strong enough to hitch to a wagon.” They laughed. “I guess you want work,” he said wearily. “You worked with Bughead before. You’ll work with him again, okay?”

“Bughead’s O.K. We can work with him,” Joey said.

The Spotter laughed appreciatively. “You’re a natcheral born assemblyman, Joey, ‘cept when you blow your top.” He fished a tenner out of his wallet. “Get yourself a room and a meal. This name-callin’ gotta stop, Joey I don’t give a damn if a guy’s a chink so long as he works for me. I gotta Jew runnin’ a speak for me around the corner. My lawyer’s a Jewish guy.”

“I was a sap, Spotter.”

“You oughta know,” the Spotter said quick as a knife thrust, and then he added reflectively, “You’re no sap, kiddo. Don’t try and fool the ol’ Spotter. And remember this. Bughead’s got a grudge against you maybe, but grudges don’t mean a damn until one of the guys takes a baseball bat to the other guy.”

“Yeh.”

“Okay now, Joey?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t ask, but what happened with Johnny Murtagh and the Dusters?”

“Forget it, kiddo. This guy Volstead, he took care of everything.”

When the voice behind the speakeasy door said, “Who’s there?” Bughead answered, “We usta go to Gilroy’s.” Behind him stood his delegation of strongarms, Ted Griffin, Georgie Connelly and Joey Kasow.

Gilroy’s had been a corner saloon on Forty-Fifth and Ninth, with two elk heads over the bar. The elk heads were in a second-hand furniture store now and Gilroy’s patrons had scattered among a half dozen neighborhood speaks like this speak, up three flights of tenement stairs. “We hit the joints that don’t use our protection and rough ‘em up,” Bughead Moore had explained to the ex-hoboes.

“Anybody from Gilroy’s okay,” the voice greeted, throwing out the welcome mat.

The door opened and all four Young Democrats piled through before the door-watcher could catch a second breath.

He edged away from the door, a middle-aged man with hanging jowls like flaps of pinkish leather. But his eyes, round and still in his head, didn’t even show a glint of surprise as if long ago he’d become used to the idea of being cornered by fast-moving muscles.

“O’Hara, you bastid!” Bughead said with a wide grin and hustled him from the kitchen into the flat’s front room. There, slowly turning his blonde cannonball of a head on his shoulders, the neckless Bug sized things up.

In the front room, absolutely neutral, five or six customers sat at almost as many tables. Those tables were a bargain-lot bought second-hand and the customers looked as if they’d come along in a second lot; two dock wallopers at a battered walnut table near the drawn window shades; a couple of neighborhood boys, caps on their heads at a wire-legged table whose best days had been spent in an ice cream parlor; an old fellow with a medium ripe plum for a nose drinking all by his lonesome.

“Beat it, you guys!” Bughead ordered O’Hara’s customers. “There’s gonna be a padlock on this joint in an hour.”

“O’Hara — ” the old fellow began when the Bug shouted him deaf and dumb.

“Doncha unnerstan’ no English!”

Plum Nose drained the last drop of whiskey in his glass; all the customers tilted their glasses. O’Hara’s speak emptied like a pot of water heaved through a fire-escape window.

“What’ve I done to you?” O’Hara asked as if he felt he should say something, no matter what.

The Bug sneered. “Runs a speak in our territory and what’s he done?”

“I can’t afford no pertection. Take a look for yourself.”

They all looked around at O’Hara’s hole-in-the-wall proposition, with O’Hara the sole prop and chief bartender. O’Hara had been a foreman in a shut-down brewery On the skids, now, O’Hara.

“You pay the cops doncha?” the Bug stated.

“Everybody pays the cops.”

“Maybe you pay Ownie Madden?” The Bug winked at his silent strongarms and Joey thought, this was the Bug’s speed. Putting the pins and needles into a guy licked before he started.

“Not a dime I swear to Christ. Only pertection I pay’s the cops.”

“You’re in our territory, O’Hara,” the Bug said and he was on O’Hara like a ten-ton truck. He was grinning, for there was nothing the Bug loved better than breaking noses and bottles. O’Hara would supply both tonight.

O’Hara retreated to the wall. “For Christ sake,” he pleaded.

The Bug socked him one in the gut; his second punch caught O’Hara flush in the face. O’Hara fell. The Bug kicked him in the knee, aiming the boot with a surgeon’s eye. O’Hara would have a gimpy leg tomorrow.

Ted, Georgie and Joey’d already headed for the kitchen; in the tenement speaks the kitchens were the liquor storerooms. Ted swung a closet door open. On the top shelf eight or nine bottles of whiskey stood in two rows like good soldiers. Georgie reached up. A bottle in each hand, he dashed over to the sink, smashed them against the faucets. “Wow!” Georgie chanted, Wow!” Joey, investigating the icebox, pulled out a jug of home brewed beer. “Lemme bust it!” Georgie called, grinning. Joey passed him the jug, Georgie smashed it, and the dark furry smell of beer mixed with the smell of the spilled whiskey. “Georgie!” Ted said. “Here y’are.” He tossed over a bottle from the closet. “Fly ball, Georgie!”

When they returned to the front room the Bug was resting in a chair, his knife-edged trousers lifted high over his socks. A few inches from the points of his pointy yellow shoes, O’Hara’s hands lay like rags on the floor. O’Hara was bleeding, a trickle of blood in a thin red ribbon seemed pasted to his lips. Even Georgie stopped grinning while Joey wondered what that damn Bug’d been up to alone in the room with O’Hara.

The Bug got up, he kicked aimlessly at the man on the floor, without any real interest like a kid about to throw away the dead mouse he’d been torturing. “We gotta coupla more of these bastids t’night,” the Bug said lazily.

Georgie was staring, fascinated, at the man on the floor. Ted Griffin, the ex-pug said, “Wunna these days you’ll kill wunna these guys, Bug.”

“Maybe yuh wanna kiss his fanny?”

“Sure, like this!” Joey walked to the unconscious man. He kicked savagely at the flabby buttocks. Damn, he’d give the Bug something to blab about to the Spotter. Show them all, the whole damn clubhouse, the whole damn world. He fought down the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach; he turned around.

They were all looking at him: Joey’s face could have been chipped out of the slategray sidewalks three flights down from O’Hara’s wrecked speak.

• • •

Joey Kasow had made up his mind to be smart from this time out. Like a batter who has swung and missed, he was warier now as he stood waiting for the next pitch.

With fate in the pitcher’s box. And no guessing how many chances a man would get in a lifetime. For many, one strike was out, while others, luckier, might be offered a round dozen.

Joey Kasow was taking no chances. “You gotta be smart even in the lil things,” Joey explained to his sidekick Georgie when they moved out of their furnished room in a FOR MEN ONLY hotel on Forty-Second and Tenth, into a big furnished place in a Chelsea brownstone on Twenty-Fourth off Eighth right smack in the middle of Hudson Duster territory. “We don’t wanna be near our dumb family, Georgie. Suppose we bump into ‘em and they start askin’ questions and maybe squawkin’ to the coppers.”

“Let ‘em squawk,” Georgie’d replied. “We eighteen or ain’t we eighteen?”

“We ain’t legal ‘til we’re twenty-one,” Joey had answered sagely, if mistakenly, as if he spent all his spare time in a lawyer’s office.

“Yeh, I guess you’re right,” Georgie’d said, impressed.

Their first furnished room had been a rathole, so small that Joey used to say, “No deep breathin’ or we’ll go through the damn walls, Georgie!” But that was in the spring after they’d just gotten in again with the gang and only rated a fiver for a night’s work. By fall they were drawing a steady fifty bucks a week whether they worked or not. To the ex-hoboes, it was a regular fortune. Their room rent on Twenty-Fourth was six bucks a week, meals another couple bucks a day. Up at the Young Democrats there was often a keg of free beer, and Bughead didn’t mind when they salvaged a bottle of whiskey out of some roughed-up speak. “Only don’t be a hog,” the Bug would warn his strongarms, a quart in each of his overcoat pockets, with a third quart under an armpit. Fifty bucks was big, especially in the beginning.

After a while, what with new clothes and dames who had to be paid in advance, that fifty was running like a racehorse out of their pockets. A smart guy got himself fixed up with private stuff, Joey began to think, as he listened to the guys bragging up at the club.

“This ginzo girl lives on Thirty-Nint’. Her ole man thought she was gonna be strict. What a joke!”

“Thas nothin’. I gotta girl never been with no guy except me.”

Seemed that all of them, with the exception of Joey Kasow, had a private little dame somewhere. A girl who was no top-of-the-roof special, a girl one hundred percent clean until yours truly had stepped into sight, in a suit and tie and socks the color of a rainbow. In those loud duds, like birds slick in their plumage, they pecked away with greedy beaks.

Oh, the good girls, the good girls. There were no in-betweens down the West Side. A girl was either a whore or she was up on a pedestal a million miles high, wearing a snowcloud for a coat and burglar-proof locks at her buttonholes. And maybe that was why it was such a stunt to pull a good girl down into the gutter. As if there was a gold medal in it from The Society of Madames and Pimps, Inc.

All of Joey’s girls had been everybody else’s girls. Girls of the line-ups, dopey Doras, bitchos on wheels. Love? That was a word in a song at the vaudeville. A guy had to have a girl just as he had to eat or sleep, about summed up Joey’s philosophy. But now that he was eating regular, he was thinking it made no sense making the whores rich.

Love? A song, a laugh….

On a November day, Joey left their room, a cigarette slanting out of his mouth, two suits on his arm, one Georgie’s and one his own. He swaggered down the street, into the tailor shop near Ninth where they were bringing their clothes. The tailor raised his face from a pair of trousers he was mending. Joey hadn’t ever seen him before. “Where’s the tailor?” Joey asked.

“I buy the biz’ness from Mister Goldfarb,” the man said. “Sadie,” he called. The curtain in the rear of the store parted, a girl hurried toward them and the tailor bent to his stitching. It was as if he had dropped through a hole in the floor. Did he have reddish hair too; was the fuzz on his bald head reddish? He was gone where the work-worn and middle-aged go. The girl was young and pretty and redhaired. Joey stared at her. Against the dark blue serges, the chestnut browns, the iron grays of the pressed suits hanging on a long iron rod, her long hair, coiled around her head, glinted, a glinting red crown.

He’d seen a hundred prettier girls on the streets of Chelsea. But there was something flukey about this one that puzzled him. Then her downcast eyes, her lips too tightly closed reminded him of the way the nuns looked when you tried to catch their eye. Nuns? Joey had to smile at the idea of a nun by the name of Sadie. Sadie, the cherry, he thought, a virgin. A trap door in his mind opened and the street talk and the street superstitions flooded into his consciousness. The Jewish girls, the Jewish girls, they were built tighter, they were softer, they layed like dinges, they layed cold as icebergs.

“Press them suits good, will you, Sadie,” he smiled.

He saw the color of her eyes now as they flashed at him, reddish-brown and round and indignant.

“Don’t you want me to call you Sadie?” he asked innocently.

The tailor was peering up at this customer. Another boy who wasn’t a boy. Another loafer dressed in the middle of the afternoon like for a wild party. “Give the receipt Sadie,” he muttered.

“Yes, papa.” She reached for a pad on the counter while Joey watched that moving hand of hers, slim and quick and covered with the palest of freckles. “The name, mister?”

“Don’t call me mister, Sadie. Make that receipt out to Joey. Just Joey.”

And that was how he began with Sadie Madofsky. That was how all the guys began with the good girls in the neighborhood. Georgie would discover her for himself. “Boy, Joey, that’s some redhead down the Jew tailor!” All Joey had said then was, “She’s okay, but that ole man of hers wouldn’t let you get within a mile.” That was more truth than poetry. Madofsky the tailor had an eagle eye on him like a honest detective’s, soured at the price of being honest in a crooked world. Madofsky the tailor had never gotten used to hearing what he called “gangsters and bummers” joking with his sixteen-year-old daughter. Besides, Joey wouldn’t have admitted his interest in Sadie Madofsky for a hundred in cold cash. Not to Georgie, not to any of the guys. And have them razzing him! Christ, that’s all he needed — the old razz about jewboys falling for jewgirls.

Falling? So far all he’d done was give Sadie a big smile if she happened to be in the store when he picked up his pressed suits. Anyway, he was too busy to break his neck over any hard-to-get dame. There were plenty of pick-ups, the speaks were lousy with them. The trouble with those whiskey lushes was that buying them a good time came to more money than a flying trip to a whore house. He started going with a waitress. But she was the original Miss Need-It: always needing stockings, perfume, even a suitcase. Also, you couldn’t exactly call her private stuff.

He noticed that Sadie was never around mornings. “She goes to school?” he asked her father one morning with the politest of smiles that fooled nobody but the headless rows of hanging suits. Madofsky the tailor grunted. Joey persisted, “High school, huh?” And wormed out the information that Sadie attended Washington Irving over on East Sixteenth Street. Now he made it his business to bring in his suits in the late afternoons, and once when her father wasn’t within hearing, he whispered, “Suppose I meet you at Washington Irving some day?” The girl blushed, shaking her head angrily, but that week he was waiting for her, laughing to see her cheeks redden. It was the cherry in her, he thought with pleasure and anticipation.