Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue (7 page)

S
WEET-FACED
R
UBEN
had given the block an all-clear wave because the linen-suited Joey Parma had turned east, away from their block toward the Casita Meshugaloo, a vacant lot on which a Puerto Rican country house had been built. The house had been covered with enough red and turquoise paint to conceal the questionable carpentry and in places skilled carpentry with questionable materials. A railing across the front porch was made out of dismantled wooden chairs. On top of this little one-story building dwarfed by six-floor tenements on three sides flew the red, white, and blue flag of Puerto Rico and the blue-and-white flag of Israel.

The remaining lot space was used to grow tomatoes, beans, and corn. They had even planted two banana bushes. It was an uncertain agricultural society, New Yorkers trying to grow food with the memories of their parents. Aside from five brilliant amber sunflowers, the crops were not doing well. But it was still early summer. Already, prospering weeds had grown into high bushes that gave the lot the illusion of lushness, much the way thick tropical vegetation had hidden the poverty in their parents' island. New York in the summertime is tropical, too, and any patch of soil left alone will turn uselessly bushy and green. It must have been a jungle each summer before Europeans started building here.

But in Manhattan, buildings had their own natural law the way plants do in other places. Vacant lots where tenements had been removed by real estate speculators stood like gaps from missing teedi, waiting for the right time to build. The right time would be soon. In the meantime, the holes had been overgrown by gardens, parks, casitas. In Manhattan's natural law, space does not go unused. The squatters who had moved into Harry's buildings followed this natural law, too. Real estate abhors a vacuum even more than does nature.

Most of the time, Chow Mein Vega, the Meshugaloo himself could be found seated inside the casita at a round table made from a huge spool that had once held cable.

Chow Mein Vega had invented the word "meshugaloo," perhaps the only word of a language called "Spiddish" that was a cross of Nuyo-rican Spanish and Lower East Side Yiddish and thus a purely New York idiom. For the contribution of the word "meshugaloo," Chow Mein Vega was the only gentile to have had his name in the sidewalk of Saul Grossman's Deli on Second Avenue, where the greats of Yiddish theater were meticulously inscribed in concrete. The
Forward
interviewed him on the occasion of his name being installed and asked him what "meshugaloo" meant.

"It's a cross between meshugenah and boogaloo. If you think about it, it is a meshugenah boogaloo."

"But what does that mean?"

"Meshugenah, you know, means meshugenah."

"Yes."

"You know, crazy And boogaloo ... boogaloo means everything. It is a fusion. A rhythm-and-blues beat with a Latin twist. It is very elusive, you know. A cha-cha-cha has that three-beat, and a salsa—let's face it, you have to have form for salsa and mambo. But with boogaloo you can do anything. Wave your arms. You can wiggle your hips. You are in tempo. Boogaloo means everything and yet it means nothing.
Es gor-nisht pero todo.
You know what I'm saying. That's its appeal. It's very heavy-duty. Boogaloo—ahhh! Forget it!"

This answer was then translated into Yiddish for the Yiddish-language edition. Chow Mein Vega spoke Spanish and English the same way, offering rhythms, not clarity. Nor was his name really Chow Mein Vega. It was Carlos Rodriguez. According to his promoter, Howard Gold, another Spiddish speaker, "The name Carlos Rodriguez would be excellent for baseball, but for boogaloo
eso no dice bupkiss."
It says nothing.

New York Latinos did not remember the Chicago act Tom and Jer-rio, which recorded the first boogaloo in 1965. Its most enduring innovation was the line "Sock it to me," which became a mantra, repeated for all occasions in the late sixties. In Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia, boogaloo was black music. But in New York, Puerto Ricans fused it with salsa and made "the Latin boogaloo." Latin boogaloo was invented not by Carlos Rodriguez, but by friends of his with whom he had grown up playing baseball in East Harlem, such as Joe Cuba, whose real name, Gilberto Calderón, had also been changed because it was deemed to have said nothing. They had all made money playing together at Jewish clubs in the Catskills in the 1950s. Back in New York in the sixties, playing to Latin and black crowds, with new names invented by Jewish promoters, they had accidentally developed a Latin boogaloo without knowing what the word meant. No one could even remember how it came about.

Many of these Nuyorican boogalooistas carried with them the memories of Jewish clubs in the mountains, though their Jewish fans did not remember them because they now had new names. At first, Carlos did not want to be called Chow Mein. But after his biggest hit, "The Yiddish Boogaloo," people all over the world knew him as Chow Mein Vega and the name to him became synonymous with money and success. "It's funny," he said. "You become somebody and that's it.
Es far-tik.
It's done." After "The Yiddish Boogaloo," he knew that he would always be Chow Mein Vega, even though he suspected that he was trapped in a half-truth.

Most boogalooistas had a defining boogaloo, such as Ricardo Ray's "Danzon Boogaloo" or Pete Rodriguez's "Pete's Boogaloo." It was New York music. The idea for "The Yiddish Boogaloo" came from the neighborhood. Joe Cuba's 1967 "Bang Bang" described the cultural tension between blacks and Latinos in Harlem, between cornbread and
lechón.
But "The Yiddish Boogaloo" was about a different neighborhood:

Eh! Yiddisha hugaloo
Meshugaloo—ahhh!
Meshugabo — ahh!
Second Avenue—ahhhh!
Go to the deli,
And you will find,
Corned beef,
pasteles,
And pastrami on rye.
And for dessert
—moiongo
pie!
And as you leave
They'll give you
A kishka good-bye.

Thousands of people would raise their arms and shout in a slow crescendo, "Meshugaloo—ahhhh!" It became a spontaneous cry whenever Chow Mein Vega and his six-piece band appeared on a stage—in New York; San Juan; Sao Paulo; Paris; Juneau, Alaska; Tel Aviv; Tokyo— "Meshugaloo—ahhhh!"

For a moment, it transformed the neighborhood. It was the late sixties, and the yippies had moved in, buying their smoke on Tenth Street. Yiddish theaters on Second Avenue were being turned into rock concert halls. But after Chow Mein Vega's "Yiddish Boogaloo," hundreds came downtown to eat at Saul Grossman's Deli. He even added
pasteles
to the menu. Chow Mein's mother came down to show his cooks—most of whom were uptown blacks—how to make her
pasteles,
while Rabbi Chaim Litvakfrom the little synagogue on Sixth Street observed, making certain that these
pasteles
were in accordance with the book of Deuteronomy, certifiably kosher
pasteles.
Rabbi Litvak worked with Mrs. Rodriguez on a recipe with ground beef instead of pork, mixed with a hamless tomato
sofrito,
which is a sautéed sauce base. Problems came with the masa, the grated green banana dough, on the outside. Mrs. Rodriguez almost gave up when Rabbi Litvak told her she could not add cream to the masa because the filling had meat. She had always regarded the cream as the hidden touch that made her
pasteles
special and had even hesitated to reveal her secret. She did not care that her snobbish neighbor from the island always claimed that the cream was "a completely Nuyorican thing." There is a great difference of opinion on whether Nuyorican is a pejorative adjective. It depended on the speaker. Sal First could make "Spanish" sound pejorative.

With great reluctance, Mrs. Rodriguez backed off from her Nuyorican cream recipe. Still, it took considerable research to find a supplier who was able to assure that their banana leaves, the outer wrapper of
pasteles,
were acceptable to rabbinic standards.

Saul liked the
pasteles
and tried to get the team of Rodriguez and Litvak working on a
mofongo
pie, Saul not realizing that
mofongo
was never served in a pie. But Mrs. Rodriguez was not difficult. She accepted the idea of putting
mofongo
in a piecrust. But what to her was not negotiable was mashing the green bananas in pork fat. Everyone knows that it is pork fat that makes
mofongo
good. They tried numerous alternative fats, but they could never find one that both Mrs. Rodriguez and Rabbi Litvak could approve. Rabbi Litvak thought mashed plantains in garlic and soy oil—"a good pareve oil," he argued—was a great dish. "You could even boil them like dumplings and put them in soup," he suggested.
Plátano knadlech.

No, Mrs. Rodriguez shook her head insistently, raising her arm and waving her outstretched fingers. "This
mofongo
tastes of nada.
Na-da!"

Rabbi Litvak, a connoisseur of didactic hand movements, admired the gesture. A stubborn man, he profited from the entire encounter. Though Saul Grossman could not find an acceptable
mofongo
for
mofongo
pie, Litvak started using mashed green bananas, garlic, and soy oil as a snack along with the herring for Friday night kiddushes. Litvak's
mofongo
was also perfect for the rabbi's Sunday morning breakfasts, which by tradition emphasized fats and carbohydrates. Every Sunday morning, a handful of aging followers sat with the rabbi and debated on Jewish writings and the events of the day while being served Scotch, bourbon, noodle kugel, Yankel Fink's knishes—arguably the densest material ever made by man—and the rabbi's kosher
mofongo.
Sometimes Eli Rab-binowitz would come, and then he would contribute blintzes laid out in disposable aluminum pans that got misshapened as Litvak's followers hungrily grabbed for them because Rabbinowitz never brought enough, and the polite and the slow would be left with
mofongo.
Thank God for the noodle kugel. Thank God for the bourbon.

With the shooting of Rabbinowitz, there would be no more blintzes for the rabbi's breakfast. From a gastronomic point of view, they would have preferred that Yankel Fink had been shot.

When Joey Parma arrived at the casita, his linen wilted in mid-morning heat, he admired the neat rows of struggling crops, pastel flowering peas, drooping tomato vines with small, misshapen yellow fruit, and lush weed patches. Chow Mein was standing in front of a four-foot fruitless banana plant, stroking a broad, limp leaf. He had gained almost one hundred pounds since the boogaloo days, and with his often incomprehensible pronouncements and his rounding size, he was becoming more suggestive of Buddha than boogaloo. The banana bush looked very small next to him.

"Joey, did you ever see a banana grow?"

"I'm Italian."

"Me either. I'm Puerto Rican. I should be able to grow bananas. I wonder how they do it," Chow Mein said, thoughtfully stroking his gnarled and stumpy ponytail, which was not doing much better than the bananas.

"Well, I'm Italian and I cannot make a good espresso. Not like they make in Italy. Some say it's the water. But there are Italian restaurants here that do it. What are you going to do with the bananas? Did you see the article in the
Times?
Enrico Petruchi uses them with sea bass and endive."

Chow Mein was silent for a minute. He was not going to give this white guy the satisfaction of showing that he didn't know who Enrique Petuque was. "I just want to see them grow. A casita should have bananas," he finally said.

"Were you here last night?"

"The Hamptons are so crowded this time of year."

Joey showed no sign of appreciating the joke.

"Is it true you couldn't find his head?"

"We got his head. We even got the angle of the firing, so we know the height of the killer."

"Unless he shoots from a weird angle," said Chow Mein, knowing that the cops had already decided that whatever height they came up with was the height of Latino people. He stood up, as though daring Joey to make a note of his height, and said, "You know we shouldn't talk here. Cops in a casita is a very bad gestalt,
tu sabe'."

"Let's go eat something."

Chow Mein knew he would say that. He tried to cooperate with the police because he, too, had loved drugs in the sixties but hated them in the eighties. He had lost too many friends. Also he liked to eat with Joey Parma, because if you ate with Joey, it was always "on the house."

"You know," said Chow Mein, "I'd like to go to Rabbinowitz's. I loved his blintzes. With the sour cream." He snapped his fingers.

"Well, closed today."

"It was the last good blintzes in the neighborhood. What are we going to do?"

"There's a new little French place."

"If I can't have blintzes," said Chow Mein, gently dusting some kind of white powder off Joey Parma's linen jacket, "let's go
cuchifrito."

As they walked around the corner to the
cuchifrito,
Chow Mein nodded thoughtfully while Joey explained what he had just learned: how to use talcum powder to remove a grease stain. They stood at a counter and ate fried bananas and beans and fat slices of pork roasted with garlic and coriander seeds, served with a pepper sauce that immediately produced intense pain. When Joey was able to speak again, he looked at Chow Mein through the tears in his own eyes, shook his head, and said, "Good, huh?" And Chow Mein laughed.

"It's the endorms," Joey opined.

"No, it's Consuela. She makes it like that. It's murder. Forget it."

"But we like it because of the endorms. It causes pain and makes your brain send out endorms to kill the pain."

"Why is that good?"

"Makes you feel good."

Chow Mein pulled on his ponytail. "Couldn't you just stub your toe or hit your thumb with a hammer or something?"

"Wouldn't be the same. So, were you up late last night?"

Chow Mein shrugged. "You know, the Meshugaloo never sleeps."

Joey did know. Chow Mein Vega did not sleep at night. He spent his nights at the casita, his Buddha-like body by the cable spool table, working on an autobiography in which he had not yet reached the age of fifteen. While Chow Mein Vega sat at this makeshift table, in his fake farmhouse, with his fake name, pondering the myths and minutiae of his life, he often heard a lot. But he heard nothing the night Eli Rab-binowitz was killed.