Seventh Avenue

The sound of cars coming off the Williamsburg Bridge was deafening in the late, icy December night, even though Jay lived several streets away from the main arterial road. The wind from the East River, which had ice blocks roaming about unpredictably like fugitives on the move, blew a hollow, raucous note when it collided against the damp splintery wooden structure that he lived in with his family. The walls of the apartment, painted a variation of what once might have been sea-green by a still unrepentant landlord forced into this diabolical act of folly by a housing inspector, concealed latent bubbles of condensation that created a sense of illusory movement if you stared at it for any length of time. To counteract the gloom of the interior, Jay glared out at the slate black, moonless sky, full of swarming, snow-bearing clouds that moved relentlessly lower before releasing their burden on the millions of already frozen, unprepared New Yorkers, who were making do with what woolens they had preserved from the late twenties. As Jay had been raised on the torments of a Lvov-incarcerated winter, somehow lived through without adequate food or clothing, the prospect of New York feebly imitating the tundra did not daunt him completely.

Restaurants and movie houses provided enough heat if you had the nerve to exchange angry sneers with waiters who tried to get you to order more than toast and coffee by flapping the menu in your face and continually changing clean ashtrays, or the ushers, that hopeless tribe of casual labor who in government statistics were not even designated as “unskilled” but for official purposes occupied some nether region of nonexistence, who flashed their lights in your face when it became too familiar, and it would after five performances; they carried on a wordless, outraged inquisition into your activities: pervert or vagrant? Fame carries its own form of danger, and Jay, handsome enough to implant his face in the memory of most people, was something of a celebrity on the East Side, inasmuch as ushers and lame waiters recognized him immediately and put out sudden alerts for the owner when he slumped down on a chair or dangled his legs on an armrest. For all of them, he represented some unclassifiable hybrid being: a cross between a thug and a gigolo. He was tall with broadish shoulders, large fisted, severe in expression and he always had some money on him. What he did, if one can describe total passivity as doing, was not illegal or immoral. He became part of the furnishings of every establishment within a square mile of the bridge, but unfortunately no one was permitted to claim him as a permanent fixture and therefore enter him on tax returns under the heading of depreciation of machinery. He was unclaimable because he was a condition rather than an object.

He got up from his seat by the window, nodded to his father, who was going through the employment section of the evening paper with his magnifying glass in search of a position that was less tiring than waiting and required less skill than ushering, and draped three scarves round his neck, before entering an old army jacket that his grandfather had cast off when Jay was still an infant and was one of the possessions he had brought with him from Poland on the long haul via Rotterdam to New York, six years previously.

Jay walked down Rivington Street, studying the long line of brick-fronted houses that, like arthritic old men, leaned forward in a line that had never been straight. Gnarled wood and crumbling gray brick surrounded him; also there were cooking smells that hung on the frosted air, emanating from kitchens where women tried all of the permutations that potatoes, cabbage, turnips and soup greens allowed. As the streets were almost warmer than the houses, many of the front doors stood ajar, flapping against wall cavities whenever a gust of wind came up from the river. The mile of the East Side that Jay roamed resembled nothing so much as a peculiarly recurring nightmare that he was forever trying to banish from his mind. Several thousand schemes occurred to him daily, but they all required a certain amount of capital, and as his salary, what there was of it, went on helping to keep his parents, his one brother and his sisters, the very concept of capital, money in the bank, belonged to fantasy.

Jay’s trade, if it could be called that, came under the heading of electrician. What he had learned, he had learned badly in Vienna under the tutelage of a half-demented step-cousin of his father’s brother-in-law who gave his days to dodging creditors, and his nights to drinking slivovitz smuggled in from Yugoslavia, and to the inspection of new faces in all of Vienna’s eighty-seven brothels. One day Uncle Klotz, as he was called, paused in front of a vellum-skinned freckled redhead, a recent arrival, aged sixteen, from an unidentified Hanseatic city, and attempted to effect her escape. Amid the chaos of the ensuing scramble, Uncle Klotz succeeded to a heroism that even as a man of action he had not been aware of and wounded the owner of the enterprise in the right buttock with a letter-opener. His gallantry was rewarded, however, and he fled with the unnamed inmate - they had not yet been introduced - to the lofty heights of Kalenberg, leaving a poorly outfitted workshop, thirty-one disgruntled workmen who had not been paid for weeks, and invoices and receipts that might have stymied a computer; to Jay, Klotz’s unwitting heir apparent, thrice removed on his brother’s side, gangling, confused, inexperienced, with no aptitude whatever for electricals, fell the task of reorganization. In a broken scribble, whose characters were markedly oriental, Jay wrote off to Lvov, attempting to explain the situation. As his father had paid his apprentice fees for one year, he glanced briefly at Jay’s illegible hen tracks and decided that they embodied a demand for money; he wrote back immediately, and with astonishing concision, “No money available.”

Left to his own devices, Jay managed by what sleight of hand it is difficult to describe, to procure a contract to service the electricals in a group of Vienna’s brothels. Not unlike a dying man, the business gave signs of a mysterious resurgence of glowing health before the final gasp whisked it into the hands of screaming creditors, befuddled tax officials and semi-starved workmen, blaming its demise on the outlaw electrician who was taking his pleasures in a remote
Gasthof
on the fringe of a wood beyond Kalenberg, and was armed with an American flintlock and hidden under a honey-colored growth of hair that with his snarling high-pitched laugh revealed a marked similarity to a hunted wolf. The end of Klotz’s Electricals can be directly traced to the wiring contract Jay fulfilled for a band of gypsies who were running a fair on the outskirts of Vienna; a short-circuit left half of the city in total darkness for nine hours, interrupted an international chess tournament, and provided virtually military assistance to a band of thieves who systematically looted all but a stationer’s shop in the district of Floridsdorf. In the midst of this squalling confusion, Jay, disguised as a son of a Turkish Army General, hurriedly departed for Lvov on a coal train, carrying with him several hundred thousand schillings’ worth of counterfeit securities that Klotz in his own flight to safety had abandoned, and two hundred schillings in currency that the gypsies had advanced him. Upon his arrival in Lvov, his father, a man of few but direct words, after a great deal of arm-flailing and half-swallowed oaths that fell like snakes’ heads from a mouth whose lips barely moved, demanded by way of compensation and for demi-pension in the family homestead Jay’s entire capital. With great reluctance Jay handed the money over because it was pointless to argue with the Veteran, a nickname given to his father by the townspeople in remembrance of the two fingers he had blown off in order to avoid conscription in the last Russian-Polish velitation.

All this seemed very remote now, as Jay wandered the streets wide-eyed, gazing into warm, well-lit restaurants where diners pushed away half-finished steaks, chicken legs, nibbled duck breasts. He gasped at the windows, his heart beating at an abnormal speed, palpitations in his temples - the legacy of hunger pangs, and the knowledge that physical relief lay behind two inches of plate glass. The food was a bare thirty feet away and was not an optical illusion but something immediate and tangible. He had been removed by force no less than eleven times from Gluckstern’s restaurant, which represented to him the crazy pinnacle of gastronomic delight. He moved swiftly away when the headwaiter returned his stare with a threatening gesture; the memory of his last expulsion still rankled. The head-waiter, catching sight of him, had furtively whispered to an oversized busboy who had then approached Jay menacingly, seized him by the collar and hurled him through the open door into the gutter, all this at the moment when Jay’s visit was just bearing fruit. For Jay had been caught red-handed with a half-gnawed lamb chop that he had slipped into his shirt pocket just as the man whose dinner it was, in fact, returned to the table, and mistaking Jay’s guilty manner for a theft of a different kind, shouted to the headwaiter that his cigarettes were missing and pointed a finger at Jay.

There were two hours to go before Jay’s shift began at the Washington Market, and he wondered how to kill the time, how best to improvise some activity that would take his mind off food. The insistent, nagging pain in his stomach was fertilized by the biting cold and the slow but steady gray jigsaw snowflakes that had already started to stick on the sidewalks. The shift would be more difficult than usual this evening because there would be the danger of slipping, and when a man fell with a hundredweight sack of onions on his shoulders he might be out of work for as long as a month. He entered a small diner on Delancey Street and sat down at the counter. A thin man with gnarled protruding veins and fiery red hands, walked, or rather drifted over to him. The man wore a white apron and a white starched topless crown which, when he bent over, revealed an area of hairless scalp. His tired, drawn face, a face that had almost never come into contact with the sun, was mute testimony to the fact that he belonged to that antlike army of night-shift workers whose meaningless existence never leaves a mark on time, and who are discharged by the body of society like some noxious product.

“Hi, Jay,” the man said.

“The usual.”

“One white draw and a pair down,” the man said to himself in the jargon of the professional counterman, as he slipped some bread in the toaster.

“Christ, it’s so goddamned cold,” Jay snapped.

“Like the heart of my mother-in-law,” the man said without smiling. “You working tonight?”

“Do I have a choice, Immie? So long as I don’t break a leg or get a killer, I work.”

“You’re a smart boy. It’s stupid to knock your brains out.”

“It’s stupid to eat too, but I have to.”

Conspiratorially Immie moved over to Jay. His breath was bitter, compounded of cigarettes and an acidic stomach, and Jay drew away slowly.

“I know a guy who wants a runner,” Immie said.

“Bookie or numbers?”

“Numbers in Chinatown.” Jay lifted his eyes skeptically. “So, what’re you scared or something? A big guy like you can handle himself.”

“I saw what they did to that Mick. Ran into him at the pool room. He’s got a career as Frankenstein with his face now.”

“If you want to make money you gotta take chances. And anyway he was a welcher.”

“That’s their story, not his.”

“Well, think it over, huh? When you’re dragging potatoes and freezing your ass off for a sawbuck a week, you might change your mind. The bread’s not bad - half a yard a week, plus commission . . .”

“Plus what you can steal?”

“Unhealthy . . . unhealthy thought,” Immie said, his eyes brightening angrily. “That’s a one-way ticket to Canarsie. They give Lepke a contract when a runner makes himself a partner.”

“Thanks for thinking of me,” Jay said.

“Sure. I just thought . . .”

“Yeah, fine.”

Jay watched the minutes on the clock tick by. He still had an hour to go and weighed Immie’s proposition in his mind. An active criminal career offended his commercial instincts. A number of young men who lived on his street had found security and respectability in petty crime - protection, collecting, thuggery, fencing, drug-peddling - for respectability was directly related to the amount of money a man brought home, and by these standards Jay could only be called an outcast. The visions he cultivated for himself centered on an undefined activity that came under the heading of big business. A chubby hand touched his shoulder and Jay looked up into the face of Barney Green.

“Dangerous to sit alone counting your money,” Barney said, whisking the snow from the collar of his camel’s hair coat. “After a while you start to talk to yourself, and then you’re certified one hundred percent crazy, and they take you away and you live happily ever after in Rockland State. But you eat regular. Not one dissatisfied customer.”

“What’ve you got to feel good about?” Jay said sullenly.

“I’m working. Some idiot wants me to emcee his wedding, and I get a Finski for making a public nuisance of myself. Want to come?”

“I’m working.”

“So? Go sick for tonight. I got a waiter’s jacket and a tie you can wear, and you can eat till it’s coming out of your ears.”