Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue (35 page)

"Luxury? This is Alphabet City. Loisaida."

"That's their problem. They want to pay the money. I have to sell something, and boyoboy, this is the best deal and it displaces the fewest people. Nobody
lives
here."

Chow Mein could not answer. He had no other home. He would move back to the barrio where he was born, where it was still a neighborhood ... for now. But if they were building luxury apartments off Avenue B, anything was possible. Someday they might even buy Spanish Harlem.

"I didn't even know that Harry owned the casita."

"We own the land. You knew somebody owned it."

"I didn't. It was just an abandoned lot. We worried about the city taking it. Harry never said anything. Maybe he didn't know that he owned it."

Ruth smiled. It was perfectly possible that Harry Seltzer owned property that he didn't know about. But he knew about this. "No, he knew," she said. "They had been offering him money for several years. Every time they offer a little more. I wish I could afford to hold out longer and let the price go up more."

"Harry never said a word."

Ruth knew what Chow Mein was thinking. This was how it always worked. Everyone loved Harry because Harry never charged anything. So now he left us without any money and I have to sell something. If he had collected a little rent now and then, I wouldn't be selling the lot. But I am the one left to do the bad thing, and Harry is loved. It's what Harry left me, she wanted to argue. "My soul isn't a raisin, if you know that expression." He did. "It's what I have to do." She did not tell him that she was thinking of moving into the new building. It was what she needed, a place in the neighborhood that had no connection, no reminder of the old neighborhood. But they would hate her for moving there, too. And now she realized that if her father had not failed, if he had realized his dream of developing the neighborhood, he would have been the most hated man on the Lower East Side.

"The funny thing is," said Chow Mein, "all the time I was feeling guilty getting Harry to pick up the tab on
cuchifritos,
and now it turns out he was the landlord."

"No," said Ruth. "He wasn't the landlord. Landlords charge rent."

Chow Mein smiled. "Yeah, that's true."

Then some words came out of Ruth's mouth that as far as anyone knew had never come out of her mouth before. "Oh, shit," she said.

She looked behind her to make sure no one was listening. "I can find an apartment for you."

"I have no money"

She looked around again. "We still have lots of people squatting," she whispered. Chow Mein smiled. "But you can't tell anyone. And if Harry comes back from the dead to laugh at me, don't tell him, either. Just don't tell anyone."

"No. I mean, thank you. Thank you. But this isn't going to be any place for me."

"Harry would want you to stay."

"But Harry's not here. The casita won't be here."

"I know that we are lucky because my father left all this property, but we have never earned any money on it. The best thing it's given us is free places to live. Can I tell you something?"

"What?"

"Have you ever had"—she hesitated to pronounce the word—"a vacation?"

"Oh man, when boogaloo was hot, we had everything. Don't know where it went. I just drank it all up, I think"

"I have never been on a vacation. Have you ever been to Iceland?"

"Iceland?"

"All my life I have wanted to go to Iceland. It has glaciers, volcanoes, and towns half-covered in lava, and geysers and mineral springs so warm you can swim in the winter with the ice and snow all around. And the people are all Vikings."

"Vikings," said Chow Mein, indicating a horned helmet with his two hands.

"The Vikings never wore those. I think that was Germans. The Vikings wrote literature, sagas describing their adventures. It's all written down. How they came to America before anyone. I've read some of them. And today they still speak Viking and eat putrefied shark and whale blubber. When I told my son Mordy that I wanted to go to Iceland and eat whale, he was completely disgusted with me."

"Are there any Jews in Iceland?"

Ruth laughed. "What a question. You've become more Jewish than my sons."

"I've tried to teach them." They both laughed.

"Probably if there had been any Jewish Vikings, they would have moved to Israel by now. I think Jewish Vikings would definitely make aliyah."

Chow Mein laughed.

"I would love to go to Iceland. I would even go over a bridge to get to the airport if I could fly to Iceland for
vacation."
Her voice caressed the last word. "Is there any place you want to go that you haven't been?"

Chow Mein nodded.

"Where?"

"You won't tell anyone?"

"No. Of course not."

"Puerto Rico."

"You have never been there?!"

"Once for a concert, but it was in a club near the airport. I have never seen the part of the island where my parents were born. Cabo Rojo. You know, the people there make
pasteles
stuffed with crab and
mofongo
with
carrucha,
you know,
carrucha,
scungilli... You don't eat that stuff Big sea snails and pepper sauce. When I finish my book, I'm out of here. I'm going to get a place in Cabo Rojo. That's why I don't need an apartment. I'm not even going to be here much longer."

Ruth took his thick right hand in her two small ones. "You made the neighborhood a better place."

Chow Mein looked at her. "That's because I thought it was my place, too."

It was Chow Mein Vega's idea, the perfect tribute to Harry Seltzer: a concert. On the program were a dozen musicians Harry had tried to help. Many young musicians offered to play, some out of respect for Harry, some because various club owners and music people who knew Harry, such as Tommy Drapper, would be in the audience, and some for both reasons. Nathan did not offer to play his harmonica because Harry had never liked it. The whole concert made Nathan sad, reminded him of the great distance that always stood between him and his father. Mordy was undeterred and installed equipment to perform his "Pentium Processor Concerto," a series of electronic bleeps and bongs. At several points the piece seemed to stop, and invariably a few people would make themselves foolish by starting to applaud just as it started up again, so that when it finally ended no one dared applaud.

Wilson Morelos had asked for a spot, saying that Harry had been very kind to him. Chow Mein let him play a short horn piece and was surprised to hear a restrained, cool, muted sound, not Dominican merengue.

Chow Mein Vega had to play the finale, even though Ruth and almost everyone else found it hard to imagine how boogaloo would fit in a memorial concert. The piece was listed on the program as "Un Boogaloo Mas," "One More Boogaloo." Chow Mein had asked Felix to play congas with him, as he often did, but there were no other musicians. It did not begin with "Ahhhh!" There was no singing, only a slowed-down boogaloo beat on congas while Chow Mein plucked an acoustic guitar, the two playing and thinking about loss. Felix, as he patted the skins of his congas, remembered the green Cibao and all the people waiting for the money he could no longer send since he had left the drug trade, while Chow Mein lost himself in memories of baseball championships in the barrio and the scream of crowds in the great years of boogaloo and his wife, who died in New York while he was touring— and of Harry Seltzer, who had always tried to help.

After the concert, Tommy Drapper was at the head of a phalanx of music people who headed for Chow Mein Vega and Felix with offers. Felix listened with excitement and then horror as Chow Mein turned them all down. "I am a boogaloo singer. We'll play boogaloo."

"Nobody wants boogaloo. They want what you just did," said Drap-per.

"I'm just a boogaloo singer," Chow Mein kept saying. His only explanation to Felix: "Everybody has to have something that isn't for sale."

"Everyone who is rich. Poor people have everything for sale."

"If you are poor, it is even more important to keep something for yourself, to have something that is not for sale."

"Fine. We're the millionaires of the Loisaida. We are above making money!"

Chow Mein could see that Felix didn't understand. Harry would have understood. Harry was the old neighborhood.

Nathan took Sarah by the hand and walked to the copy center. He lifted the iron gate to let them in but kept it halfway down so that the shop remained closed.

"Lamento mucho
about
tu padre,"
said Carmela from the fire escape. Nathan waved up at her.

Nathan gave his own memorial concert with an audience of Sarah and Pepe Le Moko, who sat together in a corner in rapt attention as Nathan exhaled on his harmonica the soft, dark, pleading, slightly Middle Eastern notes of a Kol Nidre. The Kol Nidre is to remove guilt for unfulfilled vows. Harry did not particularly like the piece. Harry did not like Kol Nidre, he did not like classical music, and he most definitely did not like the harmonica. But it was Nathan's music. It was his harmonica variation of a Max Bruch cello piece that Nathan had played in synagogue for Yom Kippur when he was fourteen. Harry had gone up to him afterward and told his son that he thought it was beautiful. It was the only time Harry had ever praised his music. Then he turned to Ruth, saying, "I'd love to hear Nathan's music on a cello! On a cello, that would be something!" Even as Nathan played now, he could hear Harry saying, "That would be something!"

"Hey," said Ruben, sticking his head under the gate.

Nathan looked up.

"The guy who did this said to be sure to show it to you. Said you would appreciate it."

"Let's see it."

Ruben turned around and yanked up his T-shirt, revealing an American flag unfurled across his back flying from a tall red penis. Nathan tried to think of a way to distract Sarah. But Ruben protested, "It's art. You should see what I paid for this. It's art.
Tu sabe',
your father bought me my first tattoo."

"I want to see it again!" said Sarah.

T
HE SUMMER
was over and so were the Mets, Michael Dukakis, and the Jewish year. George Bush was ahead in the polls 45 to 41 percent. Sixty percent to 27 said that Bush was "stronger on defense," though from the East Village point of view, who was there to defend against, except maybe George Bush?

The Mets clinched the Eastern Division, but Nusan saw what was coming. The Dodgers, a team people used to root for until it moved to Los Angeles, had a pitcher with the weird name of Orel Hershiser that no Met, not even Strawberry, could hit. "Orel?" said an angry Dr. Kucher. "Oral! They are shut down by a pitcher named Oral and you don't think there is something Freudian going on?"

Karoline married into what she called "a rational life," which meant a life without her destructive passions. She was glad that there had been a time when she had let herself indulge, that she had in a sense "gotten away with it"—done it and stopped before it destroyed her. Still, sometimes she caught herself wishing for one last time. In time, she hoped, she would not remember this summer.

Now, twenty years after the first Fat Finkelstein was killed in a place called Khe Sanh that Nathan had refused to fight for, Nathan walked by the Moellens' abandoned Edelweiss Pastry Shop and found that it too was now called Khe Sanh—a much-talked-about new Vietnamese restaurant.

Khe Sanh instantly became the most popular new place in the neighborhood. Nathan overheard the girlfriend of the seersucker
far-darter
discussing the restaurant situation. "Khe Sanh," she explained, "is a good place to be at the end of a long day You can sit there and have some coconut milk. But it's not for a birthday!"

"Oh God, no," agreed the seersucker
fardarter.
"For a birthday you need something like Viva la Huelga!"

"I don't know. Mexican?"

"But it's
nueva cocina.
They have red snapper chimichangas."

Both restaurants were making money In fact, it seemed almost everybody was making money. Most of the old neighborhood people complained about what was happening, but rather than put their
tokhes
on the table, they put their signature on the contract. And they made money Worthless properties commanded fortunes. Failing businesses could be sold for profits. It was a time of moneymaking for New Yorkers. Even Dr. Kucher made money. When no academic press would publish her
Pathology of the Mets,
she sold it to a commercial publisher for a $500,000 advance under the title
The Mets: A Psychodrama.

This was Nusan's explanation: "In Europe, all you can do is survive. But if you have the kind of luck to survive in Europe, chances are in America you will end up rich. Whether you want to be or not."

Even Nathan's shop was showing a profit—in part because of the higher prices he charged the new restaurants for their menus and flyers. A producer was investing in Sonia's play, and it would soon move to a larger theater. But also the Seltzers were about to get a great deal of money for selling their vacant lot, which would become the tallest apartment building in the neighborhood. Ruth had been offered the penthouse, but having never lived higher than the sixth floor, she didn't like the idea; it made her feel queasy, a feeling that was enhanced by the possibility of gazing from her living room out on the bridges of lower Manhattan.

Ruben and Palo had given up on the Japanese and found employment at a new "caviar bar." Panista and several others had also been promised jobs there. At the soon-to-be-closed casita, afternoons were passed arguing details.

"I love belugita."

"Fuck beluga, sevruga is where it's at."

"Beluga is like gold."

"No,
pendejo,
that's ossetra. I can get into ossetra. But beluga has those skins that just melt away on your tongue."

Chow Mein Vega was not yet making money, and like most of those who weren't, he would soon be out of the neighborhood.

Felix, observing that the Italians were making money and the Puerto Ricans were not, became Felice and pronounced it in the Sicilian way that rhymed with how Nusan said "knish." He renamed his store Felice's East Village Gourmet. He even made a point of dropping in on the Sals who had never noticed him as a Puerto Rican and showing off his Sicilian dialect. But the Sals were not interested in new Sicilians coming to the neighborhood and creating more competition. Sal Eleven didn't like his accent. After Felice left the store, Sal would make an expression as though he had just smelled something extremely unpleasant and dismiss the upstart with a wave of his hand. Then Sal would explain to whatever customer was there, "That guy thinks that because we are from Palermo we're supposed to
befratèlli.
But I can tell that he's not from my
mandamento.
I'm from Kalsa, there's no way he's from Kalsa. Maybe Albergheria, but not Kalsa."

"How do you know?" the customer would ask.

"The accent," said Sal, brushing away the interloper with another dismissive sweep of his arm.
"Che accènto.
It's a different part of Palermo. We Sicilians are never fooled by accents."

Sal First went even further. "That guy says he's from Palermo, but I hear his accent—Catania." He whispered the word harshly, as though it were a curse capable of summoning up the forces of darkness. But when Sal A heard the new grocer was from Catania, he stopped by to visit him. Felice denied being from Catania and said he was from Palermo. Sal A could see the Arab in him and hear it in his voice, reasoning he was from Erice, Trapani, or even Favignana, "but more likely, he is a Tunisian here illegally. That's none of my business."

Felice's East Village Gourmet became one of the popular new stores. He no longer specialized in produce from the casitas—the tomato season was over. He had started buying produce from Italians in the Bronx and had even made some contacts with upstate farmers. When the plumbing supply store next to him went out of business, he rented that and expanded his store, putting a kitchen in the back. He hired Dominican women from the neighborhood and taught them how to make caponata, but he would never speak to them in Spanish, even the ones whose family knew his back in the green Cibao. They would speak Spanish and he would shout in Italian, not Italian but Sicilian dialect, as he rolled a hard-boiled egg in his right hand. He said
ova
instead of
uova
for egg, even though the Italian would have been easier for a Spanish-speaking person to understand. He believed that hard-boiled eggs,
ova duri,
should go in almost everything, and he found a good egg connection in Washington Heights. Tomatoes were never excluded. One of his specialties was hard-boiled eggs in tomato sauce,
ova duri ca sarsa.
He grated hard-boiled eggs on top of his caponata and added artichokes, octopus, shrimp, and squid, which the Sals, in a rare point of agreement, considered an atrocity. Even more infuriating, he put a label next to the platter:
"CapunataPalirmitana,"
Parlermo-Style Caponata.

"They do this in Palermo," said Sal A, "but it is an exaggeration. It is not in good taste."

But Sal Eleven leaned forward with a knowing nod that meant he had won the argument and said, "Catania."

At the new Felice's East Village Gourmet, everything, besides Felice and his staff, was Sicilian except for two dozen bialies that came in from Grand Street every week.

Felix had become so proud, so confident, about his new business that he invited Rosita to come look at his store, the kitchen, taste some of the specialties.

"This could be, you know, what they call a mom-and-pop business."

Rosita gently pushed away from him and walked aimlessly through the store, examining vegetables. She smiled almost shyly and said, "It's just not what I want."

"It's clean, Rosita. I know what everybody thought, but there is no drug money in this business. I built it on casita tomatoes."

"This neighborhood. It's changing. Everything's changing. New opportunities. You know what I think? I told this to my mother, I thought it would make her mad. But she said, Good for you, Rosita!"

"Good for you, Rosita, what?"

"I've decided—no Puerto Ricans. Everyone is going somewhere but us. I don't want a Puerto Rican."

"I'm going somewhere." But she didn't believe him—because he was Puerto Rican, which he wasn't. His next move had been planned, even studied for. "Rosita, I'm not Puerto Rican."

"What do you mean?"

"My name is not Felix."

"I know. It's El Cuquemango."

"No," he said with irritation. "It is Felix."

"I thought you said it's not Felix."

"It's not. There are different levels of not being,
tu sabe',
and I am not El Cuquemango. But on a much deeper level I am not Felix, either."

Rosita stared at him the way she would have looked at a magician whose trick she had not yet figured out.

"I pretend to be Puerto Rican because Puerto Ricans are citizens. I'm not a citizen. I'm—I'm Italian, Siciliano, from Palermo." He started speaking in the Italian he had studied, Sicilian dialect, Palermo accent, with the final vowels swallowed. Rosita spoke to him in Nuyorican and he spoke to her in Siciliano, and they understood each other.

On the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah, the first afternoon of the Jewish New Year, the tradition is for Jews to walk to the water's edge and rid themselves of the sins of the past year by casting them in the form of pieces of bread into the water. For the Lower East Side, the nearest available repository of sins was the East River. The Seltzer family and many others would walk through the alphabet avenues. They walked past the baths, which were now jade green and called the Kyoto Baths, and past the casita, where it was written on the sidewalk, "Our home has been stolen by the Seltzers."

This had been written in the night and Chow Mein tried to wash it off the next morning, but the white paint had already set. The Seltzers and the other repentant Jews stepped over the words, walking past the projects and the Latin people who were used to seeing them over there every September.

Palo was standing in front of a brick wall where someone had written, "Jew landlords took our Casita." He was trying to block the words until Chow Mein got back with spray paint to cover it over. But Palo was not wide enough to block it completely. When Nathan walked by, Palo said, "Sorry, it wasn't us."

"I know that."

"We know who it is. We'll take care of it."

"Let it go."

"We clean up our own dirt."

Sarah, who was holding Nathan's hand, looked up at Palo and said, "Can you say
'Bay dem schtetl schteyt a schtibl'
really fast?"

Palo shook his head.

"Try! Really fast."

"We have to go, Sarah," said Nathan.

"By da stable sat a stebl," Palo said gamely. Sarah giggled.

The Jewish sinners could smell the smoke from the building Du-binski was burning down on Avenue C. The squatters would be out, the insurance would pay. Nathan could hear Harry say, "Burning them out on Rosh Hashanah, the anti-Semitic bastard."

Up the steps to the walkway over the speeding traffic of the FDR Drive they walked, down the other side through the park that was, for the first time in years, starting to be used again, so that the few remaining drug addicts, mainly old-fashioned heroin shooters, would stare in confusion as though caught with their pants down at the parade of Jewish sinners. Then they all walked to the railing by the river along the blacktop walkway, some with broad-brimmed black hats, some with colorful Israeli skullcaps so small only a hair clip would keep them on, others bareheaded, and all sharing the riverside walkway with panting joggers. The Seltzers chose their spot, under the massive steelworks of the Williamsburg Bridge, like standing between the stocky legs of a giant. Across the water were the sugar docks that landed Dominican cargo in Brooklyn.

As always happens in these matters, those with the fewest sins cast them off the most grandly. For three-year-olds sins are nearly weightless, pondered painfully but readily shed, so Sarah delighted in holding the loaf of bread Sonia had carried for her and breaking off pieces, huge chunks in rapid succession, and hurling them through the fence and into the green brown opaque and churning waters of the East River. Sarah talked of feeding the fish and strained her little body to see fish rush for the bread, but the only fish she saw had its white belly showing and was floating in the current along with what appeared to be a chair leg.

Poor Harry, afraid of rivers, never got rid of any sins. Nathan thought of how his father had carried to his death the sin of having lusted after a goy, a girl named Klara. When Harry was a child in Poland, where did he cast his sins, or was that how he learned to fear rivers?

Nathan noticed that his mother, deep in thought, occasionally dropped a piece of bread with a delicate flick of her thumb and forefinger. Ruth could not bring herself to look up at the bridge or even turn her head to the right or left, where waited the unbearable sight of more bridges. She concentrated on the water and the bread.

Nathan walked over to her, a piece of stale bread in his hand. "Mordy never comes," he said.

"Oboy it's a gift," Ruth answered.

"What is?"

"Mordy doesn't have to come here for the New Year because he has the ability to cast off his sins wherever he finds them. He just tosses them off. The rest of us can't do that. You can't. You are like your father. Like Nusan."

Nathan thought about his father. Remembering not going to the
cuchifrito
with him, he tore off a piece of bread and threw it. He thought about Nusan. Did Nusan go to another part of the river, or did he just keep his sins to torture himself? In any event, Nathan could not imagine Nusan willfully throwing out bread.

"Why was Nusan so angry with Dad?"

Ruth shook her head as though trying to shake off the question. "He wasn't. He's angry with me. Everyone's angry with me. Now all the Puerto Ricans are angry, too."

"You just did what you had to do. Everyone understands that."