Skinny Legs and All (18 page)

“You’re hearing of cosmic love?” asked Spike Cohen, the Jewish partner, the “Isaac” in Isaac & Ishmael’s. “Well, between the Jews and the Arabs there’s cosmic
hate
, already. So much to hate, the hate has permeated the dust, the hate has risen to the stars what are up above. It’s no easy thing to reduce such a hate, but the easy things I have done already. For the sake of humanity, the sake of our grandchildren, my pal Abu and I confront together this most difficult.”

“My father used to say,” put in Roland Abu Hadee (the I & I’s “Ishmael,” obviously) “that ’In Allah’s garden there grow all kinds of radishes.’ Although I myself do not share in my father’s concept of Allah, I have always been fond of the saying. In fact, I wanted to call our restaurant Two Radishes, but my friend, Spike, did not think so much of that name. Isaac and Ishmael’s was our first compromise. It is a clever one, is it not? You see what can be done?”

Indeed. On the other hand, would eight separate organizations have been interested in firebombing a restaurant named Two Radishes?

Two varieties of radish opened a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations. It was destined to become, on two separate occasions and for two entirely different reasons (neither of them having anything to do with food), the most famous restaurant in New York City. It was called Isaac & Ishmael’s.

Why Isaac & Ishmael’s instead of Spike & Abu’s or Cohen & Hadee’s? Mythology. The purple exhaust of myth, through whose plumes events and forces too huge, too complex to easily explain, crystallize into human perspective.

As Brahma, the great father god of India, moved westward with the spice caravans, his name evolved into Abram. Over the generations, he was given skin and teeth and bushy eyebrows, and became known as Abraham. However more corporeal, the Semitic version of Brahma maintained his status as patriarch.

Before he wandered from Mesopotamia, birthplace of our species, into the land of Canaan, looking for the polestar (which had gradually moved out of its usual—many had thought invariable—place in the northern sky), Abraham married his half-sister, Sarai (Sarah). Until the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah carried it to such orgiastic extremes that they lost their federal funding, incest was an acceptable practice in Middle Eastern myth, if not in everyday reality. When a year or more passed and Sarai had not conceived, she presented her husband with a little bundle of a different sort of joy, i.e., her servant girl, Hagar. Abraham took Hagar into his tent, where he wasted no time impregnating her. The son she bore him was dubbed Ishmael.

Sometime later, while in southern Canaan digging wells, Abraham managed finally to knock up Sarai. “Well Diggers Do It Deeper,” the bumper sticker read. Sarai’s baby boy was Isaac.

Now that she and Abraham had a son of their own, Sarai gave reign to repressed jealousy and kicked Hagar and Ishmael out of camp. The concubine and her tot roved in the wilderness, eventually settling in the desert next to what is now Saudi Arabia. When he came of age, Ishmael was married off by Hagar to an Egyptian girl, and from that union, legend has it, all Arabs are descended.

Isaac, following a narrow brush with the sacrificial knife, went on to wed his cousin Rebekah, and their offspring became known as
Hebrews
, a Semitic word for “wanderers.”

Thus were the lines drawn. Isaac and Ishmael, mythic half-brothers, fellow nomads, fathered by the mythic proto-patriarch to beget the Jews and the Arabs, respectively; forever joined with a blood rope of rivalry and loathing; slandering, slighting, and slaughtering one another, century after century, beneath the Middle Eastern sun.

And now, Isaac and Ishmael, pseudonyms for a couple of guys trying to demonstrate that two varieties of the radish family could flourish in a common patch, could even cross-pollinate—if only hot-headed horseradishes would leave them alone.

Regular customers—and during its second period of fame the restaurant did acquire customers—referred to Isaac & Ishmael’s as “the I and I.” Its staff called it that, as well, except for Ellen Cherry Charles, who usually spoke of her place of employ as “Jerusalem,” due to the fact that its proprietors were so in love with that distant town that they were inclined to rhapsodize about it night and day.

In the paeans of Spike Cohen and Roland Abu Hadee, Jerusalem was as dreamlike and inaccessible as it was in the musings of Raoul the doorman, even though Raoul’s notion of the Holy City stemmed from lurid and inaccurate illustrations in a Spanish-language edition of the King James Bible, whereas Spike and Abu had not only visited Jerusalem on several occasions, but also had the means to do so again. They might, in fact, have opened their restaurant in the city of their dreamy longing if only the Israeli government had granted permission.

In the end, the gentlemen were pleased with their location. While the site may have been their second choice, its proximity to United Nations Headquarters lent the I & I a semiofficial aura; trying it, symbolically at least, to the center of world aspirations to unity and peace. In addition, their situation in the New York market afforded them far, far more media exposure than they would have received in Jerusalem. They behaved as though the UN neighborhood had been their preference all along.

In no way, however, did that prevent them from mooning about Jerusalem as if Jerusalem were a rich and gorgeous woman who would take them as lovers the minute she recovered from her disease.

JOSHUA COHEN,
who became Spike, was born into a poor, Yiddish-speaking family on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He was twelve years old before he ever saw a human toe other than his mama’s or his own. We must now learn why.

In the snowy winter of 1923, his paternal grandparents and their three children had fled Russia on foot, escaping a brief but cruel pogrom organized by Chekists in Kiev. They continued across Poland into Germany, where they had relatives. Grandfather Cohen was a tailor, and his wife had gathered up every scrap of cloth in his shop to sew warm, many-layered coats and caps for the flight. Their shoes, however, were street shoes of the thinnest leather. When the family arrived at last in Germany, their feet were so frostbitten that their toes had to be amputated. Each toe on every Cohen foot. Fifty toes in all, fifty green-sheened ice worms, tossed like fish bait into the garbage pails of a hospital in Berlin.

Berliners called them
Die Krebs Familie
, “the Crab Family,” because of the manner in which they walked, scurrying about sideways on the tips of their stubs, sometimes pitching forward onto their faces. Embarrassed by those giant land crabs in their midst, the Cohens’ German relatives took up a collection and bought the toeless tribe passage to America.

When the middle child married, and he was the only one of the three to do so, he brought his bride to reside in the tenement above the Orchard Street tailor shop, where, tilting first to one side and then the other (they ambulated more erratically than Can o’ Beans), the Cohens daily performed their crab dance of life. As a young boy, Joshua thought his mother’s toes, long, rosy, and complete, were the most beautiful things on earth.

Recoiling from the clumsy clubs upon which the rest of the family staggered about, little Joshua gazed at his mother’s feet, caressed his mother’s feet, as if her feet had been carved from alabaster by a Renaissance genius, whereas in actual fact, they were rather ordinary specimens. As he grew older, his love for his mother’s lower appendages expanded to include the feet, the whole, healthy feet, of women in general. Because bare feminine feet were not commonly on display in the Orchard Street ghetto and because outings to Coney Island were few and far between, Joshua’s podalic passions gradually were transferred to shoes. Women’s shoes.

Showing his heels to the tailor’s trade, an adolescent Joshua apprenticed himself to a cobbler. By the time he was twenty-one, he had opened a small shoe store on Delancey. By the time he was thirty-five, he was known as the Shoe King of Long Island, where, distancing himself from the crustaceous scootings on Orchard Street, he owned and operated dozens of footwear boutiques. By the time he was fifty, his chain—Golda Shoes (after his mama)—had spread upstate and into New Jersey and Connecticut.

Joshua Cohen was self-educated. In the area of history, he was quite well read. About midway through his career as a shoe store tycoon, he chanced upon, in a book about modern Japan, a photograph of a mother and daughter whose feet were almost eaten away by radiation sores. They were survivors of the atomic attack on Hiroshima. Joshua stared at the picture in nauseated horror. The picture affected him in two significant ways. To begin with, it awakened in him a feeling of deep sympathy for his father’s family. He recognized for the first time that the Cohen land crabs, like the Hiroshima women, were victims of man’s inhumanity to man. That, in turn, aroused in him a powerful revulsion toward war, persecution, terrorism, any sort of violence that might maim human flesh and bone, especially the cute flesh, the darling bones of female tootsies.

Consequently, Joshua Cohen became a pacifist, growing increasingly active as the years passed. Having assumed personal responsibility for the world’s mutilated and missing toes, he marched, picketed, pamphleteered, and petitioned, protesting military action in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and South Africa. As a Jew, he began to focus more and more on the situation in the Middle East, especially after a particularly enamoring sojourn in Jerusalem.

By the time, at age sixty, that he met Roland Abu Hadee, he was ready to turn over his retail empire to his only son (his wife, uncomfortable with his adoration of her feet, had left him after but ten months of marriage: one month, he was to say, for each of her toes) and devote his life to the cause of Middle Eastern peace.

He gave up his shoe stores, but not his affection for their inventory. At the tennis club or in coffee shops, when he and Abu were dreaming their restaurant; at the reservation desk playing host once the I & I actually opened; on the sidewalk tearfully surveying the burned-out dining room after the bombing; at those moments, as well as at so many others in between, he would find his eyes straying from business at hand to fall upon the shod extremities of a nearby female (most often a stranger in the crowd), absentmindedly identifying designer and manufacturer; then, the mundane dispensed with, visually toying with a strap, say, or a bow, some laces, a tassel, a clasp, some studs; stroking from afar the various textures, slick or grainy, of calfskin, vinyl, or crocodile; finally, as if advancing from foreplay, tracing the lines of the yonic-lipped vessel: soft, fleshy swells, sleek animal musculature, insinuating curve of instep, giddy slope from heel to toe; the exact contours of the supple, rhythmic membrane that separates the exterior infinite from the interior particular, the infinity of movement, that is, from the relative quiescence of an object in space; that separates sweet and sweaty foot-meat from the broken glass and dog turds outside its protective shell.

Shoes, how did Cohen love thee? Let us count the ways.

Flats, heels, high heels, platforms, pumps, toe shoes, slippers, clogs, sling backs, loafers, moccasins, wedgies, oxfords, saddle oxfords, sneakers, sandals, go-go boots, Beatles boots, Birkenstocks, mules, Wallabees, granny boots, thongs, flip-flops, Timberlands, desert boots, Docksiders, cycling shoes, track shoes, huaraches, scuba flippers, wing tips, riding boots, Top-siders, espadrilles, high tops, golf shoes, stilettos, bowling shoes, snowshoes, clown shoes, Capezios, spikes, orthopedics, bucks, wading boots, ballet slippers, harem slippers, Japanese geta, Mary Janes, Hush Puppies, hiking boots, sabots, tap shoes, and galoshes. O shoe, leather ship that sails our cement rivers and woven seas, steering by the star of fashion, circumnavigating hostile reefs of tar and bubble gum; one hour, a tanker ferrying champagne to a playboy’s sip; the next, a raft in the slime; bon voyage, bright barge! May you dock in calm closets, safe from the rape of shoe trees.

Caterpillars might sing of the terror of shoes, Spike Cohen sang of their delight. In his memory, his mother’s plain black brogans were dessert dishes privileged to display the peach ice cream from which her surprising toes were molded. And, like Cinderella’s prince, he instinctively knew the slipper to represent the cave by which the phallic hero enters the uterine underworld. To the boy on Orchard Street, Mercury’s magic cobbler had had no monopoly on ankle wings.

If the I & I was dedicated to the preservation of humanity and its achievements, the loveliness of shoes must be counted among those achievements. Thus, Spike felt little or no guilt that his pacifist restaurateuring was subject to distraction by a passing pump. A true friend, Abu Hadee tolerated the distractions, although he couldn’t understand them. “To me,” Abu confessed, “shoes are no more than tin cans. Shoes are the cans that feet come in.”

Spike laughed at that remark. (A certain container of pork and beans might have enjoyed it, as well.) Friends could sneer, wives could flee, the fact remained that shoes were the Poli-grip that anchored the false teeth of his desire.

"A SHADOW
does not belong to the object that casts it.” That was one of Roland Abu Hadee’s favorite quotes. His understanding of it was incomplete. He knew that it had something to do with the fact that shadows were produced by light, not objects; that a shadow lengthened, shortened, or disappeared altogether, relative to availability and position of light, even though the object remained motionless and unchanged. He knew that much, and as far as he was concerned, it was more than enough. The scientific implications—for that matter, the philosophical implications—didn’t interest him. What mattered to Abu was the
music
of the sentence. “A shadow does not belong to the object that casts it.” To Abu, it was a little poem. And in general, it was the poetics, the music of things that tossed his confetti.

He had been born in a city whose name was a little poem: Dar es Salaam. He grew up in Alexandria, whose vowels rise like yeast on the tongue. The languages the boy Abu spoke were the rather prosaic English and Greek—his father, you see, was an international shipping magnate, and those were the languages of that business—but the script he saw written all about him, on the signposts and facades of Alexandria, was musical, all right. It ran complicated scales on the optic nerve. Everywhere, the Arabic alphabet wiggled and popped, enlivening crumbling architecture with outbursts of linguistic jazz, notations from the DNA songbook, energetic markings as primal as grunts and as modern as the abstract electricity of synthesizer feedback.