American Gangster (35 page)

Today a fiftyish Palestinian man in form-fitting polyester shirt has arrived at Mustafa's office. After two decades in the Brooklyn coffee shop
business, the man's most recent effort is failing and he is seeking the fighter's counsel. The rents on have skyrocketed, the Palestinian complains, he doesn't understand what the yuppies want. Mustafa listens patiently, hearing the man out. The restaurant business is difficult, he notes consolingly. “I had four different restaurants and never made money in any.” After some talk comparing the dictatorial methods of Milosevic and Saddam, the man thanks Hamsho and leaves.

“He's a nice guy,” Mustafa says. “But he's fucked in the head. Last year he comes to me with the same worries and I suggest a man who will invest in his shop. He takes the money and gambles it in Atlantic City. He never pays back my friend. Now he returns to me, same story as before. But there's nothing I can do for him. I send him to another investor and he goes again to Atlantic City, this time maybe he ends up with a knife in the neck. This is not the sort of business I wish to be involved with. After boxing, I like a quiet life.”

Today is a big day for Mustafa because, finally, his boat, a twenty-five-foot fiberglass job he moors over by Marine Parkway, is going into the water. Mustafa can't wait to take his friend, one of the Saudi princes, out for a little spin around Sea Girt.

“I came here in the bottom of a ship,” he says with sly smile. “Now I go as the captain of my own boat.”

This story got more letters, good ones that is, than any other piece in this book. Struck a chord, I guess. Or maybe it was that picture of me standing by my mom looking sheepish in my cap and gown because I showed up to graduation in shorts, an obvious sign of disrepect that earned me “a good klop” on the head. From
New York
magazine, 1998
.

In the end, all Mom said was “Good-bye, house.” She tossed the keys through the mail slot, got into her Subaru, drove down 190th Street to Underhill Avenue, turned the corner, and disappeared behind the Fensels' hedges. Forty-three years, and now the house on the corner of 190th Street and Fifty-third Avenue—
The House
—was officially sold. Gone, like that.

It reminded me of the night, two years earlier, when my father died in The House, the one I grew up in.

Years of kidney treatment, cardboard boxes full of dialysis equipment stacked in the hallway, and then one gloomy November evening he comes out of the shower and keels over from a heart attack. He managed to make it to my parents' room and lie down on the bed before dying. He looked so normal there, stretched out, seemingly ready to open one of the mystery books he took from the library a dozen at a time, skull and crossbones on the spine.

Except he was on the wrong side. The far side of the bed (the left) was his, but he hadn't made it there. He was lying on my mother's side. There were so many rituals in The House, and this was one of them: Mom slept on the right, Dad on the left.

The front doorbell rang, another breach. We always used the side door. Only the Jehovah's Witnesses came to the front. But the funeral parlor men didn't know that. Somber in their dark suits and peaked caps, they carried a stretcher and black leatherette zippered bag. Already late for what they called “another pickup,” the men paced in the kitchen while my mother stayed in the bedroom staring at my father's body. She was sure she'd seen him move.

“Look,” she said, pointing at his stomach. “He's breathing.” I embraced her, trying to calm her down, be cool, be the man of the house. Then I saw him breathe.

Alive again, same as you or me. Soon he'd get up, open the drawer of his mahogany dresser, put on his Witty Bros. suit (the best Division Street had to offer), go off to teach NYC Bd. of Ed. shop class at Junior High 74 just as he had for the past twenty-five years. Then he'd be home again at about 3:20, put on paint-smeared dungarees and hat (a quiet eccentric, he favored woolen fezzes and Nepali skullcaps), and work in his basement on whatever moonlighting carpentry job he had lined up. At dinner he'd read the “school page” of the
World-Telegram & Sun
over a plate of pot roast or some other suitably overdone meat. This routine (in spring, add gardening) varied, but not much. There was something about The House, its Queens County rectangularism and boxy rooms, that narrowed the behavioral palette.

But he was still dead, still lying on the wrong side of the bed. It was “pretty common to imagine you see the loved one move,” one of the funeral parlor guys said as they zipped their bag over my father's face and carried his body out the front door, the only time I ever remember him passing through that portal. As it turned out, one of the undertakers had gone to high school with me, thirty years before. We were both on the track team at Francis Lewis High School.

“Hey,” he said, his face brightening as he recognized me. It was as if we'd just run into each other at a high school reunion. “How you
doing
, man?”

“Not so good right now,” I replied.

“Oh, yeah … well, maybe we can get together sometime,” he said, carrying the bag containing my father's body toward the hearse waiting outside. Then they drove him down 190th Street, turned the corner, disappeared behind the Fensels' hedges, and were gone. Like that.

After that, The House's fate was sealed. As Mom, the master of utilitarian understatement, said, the place no longer “served its purpose.”

“It was a reliable place to raise you and your sister,” she summed up. And reliable (reliability being a key Mom meme) it was: strong and sturdy, a veritable Flushing fortress in red brick and gray siding. When that out-of-control Oldsmobile came tearing across the lawn and smashed into The House back in '58, did it crumble and fall? Not even a quiver. A couple of days later, I found the car's Rocket 88 insignia in the azalea bushes. My father nailed it to the basement wall. It was a Queens version of a moose head: an 88 bagged by The House.

I understand the existential positioning of this modest shingled dwelling in the vast sweep of the Jacobsonian immigrant saga. Built in 1949, purchased in 1954 from an acrimoniously divorcing couple for the then-staggering sum of $18,000, The House was the prize—compensation for the steerage, sweatshops, and years of dragging the coal bucket up five tenement flights. The House was what my father got for following General Patton into the Battle of the Bulge as a member of the Third Army. The House was what my parents and others like them had coming in this nation if they played by the rules, which for a fleeting, astounding moment were actually rigged in favor of people not very long out of the
shtetl
.

East of Gatsby's ash dumps, this part of Flushing was the “fresh-air zone,” a municipal version of God's country (“G-d” to you). Once, when I was seven, a lady ran over a raccoon in the parking lot of the Bohack Supermarket on Forty-sixth Avenue; everyone crowded around the flattened animal, congratulating themselves for living in a place still touched by the wild.

“Still the country, in parts,” someone marveled.

Here, on the frontier, we maintained the Queens version of a classless society. All of us—sons of Jews, Italians, Irish, and a couple of Poles—played million-inning thrillers with taped-up hardballs down in the vacant lots until the Parks Department built proper diamonds and wrecked everything. Our dads were firemen, cops, teachers. They all worked for the City, belonged to the appropriate union, made about the same amount of money. We didn't know anyone all that much richer than us. Back then .260 hitters made twenty thousand or less. It was another kind of playing field. We were little princes of the American Dream, snot-nosed scions of our parents' striving, piloting our bicycles through spacious, near-empty streets, scarfing pizza (extra mushrooms and hormones on mine, please) at fifteen cents a slice.

Like Babe Ruth built Yankee Stadium, my parents built The House for me. My suzerainty remained intact even after that night Dave Bell and I, blasted on Champale Malt Liquor (advertised on WWRL, it was a black man's drink), tried to sneak into The House at 3:00 a.m. “Ah-ha,” my mother shouted, flipping on the kitchen light in ambush. Startled like cockroaches, we both immediately threw up, Dave Bell on my mother's fuzzy slippers. But no matter, you've got to grow up somewhere and The House was a better place than most. Indeed, that was the real social alchemy at work inside those ever-reliable walls—the fact that my parents, barely removed from the primordial precincts of the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, were able, in a single generation, to produce such a thoroughly self-referential, proto-hipster creature like myself.

I never believed she'd really sell the place. It was a story she often told: how, when she was a girl in the Depression, my grandparents moved almost every year. Back then, the Brighton Beach/Sheepshead Bay landlord class was so hard up they'd throw in a paint job with each new rental, so why do it yourself? Paint cost money; movers charged only ten dollars. Bargain or not, my mother hated this shiftlessness. She vowed her children would not be uprooted for the sake of free paint. The House would last forever, she thought. But now, with Dad gone, too many things evoked her outsized hebraic capacity for worry. The boiler, the rosebushes, water in the basement: in my parents' strict division of labor, there was so much
he
did. But it was more than that. The doughty democracy of the neighborhood had shifted to the next, inevitable notch: Now, more often than not, those little civil-servant-style houses on the block were occupied by widows, old ladies living alone.

Then again, this is a different Queens than the one where my mother and father chose to become Americans, a wholly Other place from the one where I grew up. In the middle sixties, in the waning years of my sojourn as an increasingly disgruntled outer-borough high school student, I'd return on the 7 train from some beatnik-in-training night in Manhattan and stand at the corner of Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing. There, waiting for the Q-17 bus, which would take me deeper into what I regarded as the hopelessly provincial hinterlands, I'd look through the misty window of the Main Street Bar and Grille. On the steam table was a huge turkey with a giant fork jammed into its heavily browned breast. Men were at the bar, men about my father's age—Irish, Italians, Jews, the usual. They drank whiskey and watched
The Late, Late Show
. Even then, to the impressionable sixteen-year-old mind, it seemed like death.

Now the corner of Roosevelt and Main is a good deal livelier, and way more exotic. The bar is gone, replaced by places like the Flushing Noodle House, where a featured dish is “intestine and pig blood cake soup.” Other landmarks of my youth, Alexander's department store and the RKO Keith's where I saw movies like
Mr. Sardonicus
and
Curse of Frankenstein
have been succeeded by establishments such as the Golden Monkey Pawnbrokers and the Korean Full-Gospel Evangelical Church. Down every street is a telescopic crush of neon Chinese ideograms hawking Taiwanese restaurants and sexual remedies. Billboards exhort travelers to sail down the Yangtze River. On the venerable Long Island Railroad Bridge hangs a sign advertising Asiana Airways: “Fly the youngest fleet to the old country.” Somehow I don't think Bucharest, or Minsk, is one of those destinations.

I've always secretly believed that it was no mere coincidence that 1965, the year I left home to go to college, was also when Congress passed the Immigration and Naturalization Act, which threw the doors wide open and changed Queens forever. Now more than 125,000 Chinese and Koreans call Flushing home. A quarter of the city's newly arrived Latin
American population lives in Queens. Peruvians, Bolivians, Colombians, Nicaraguans—almost every country in the Caribbean and South America has a sizable representation. East Indians fill Jackson Heights. Once Jimmy Breslin, Queens' own Charles Dickens disguised as Archie Bunker, articulated the perfect nasal pitch of the borough's blue-collar white man. These days Breslin lives in Manhattan; much of his cop/fireman constituency has moved to Long Island or Florida; and if you go over to Elmhurst's Newtown High (a sleepy, Irish-dominated school when we played them in basketball during the middle sixties), you'll hear a hip-hop Babel of upward of forty different languages.

Thirty-five years after freezing on the corner of Roosevelt and Main, I am an eager tourist in the land of my upbringing. I love to get into the car and cruise the diversity hot spots, places like the intersection of Ninety-first Place and Corona Avenue, where within the space of a single block stand the Chinese Seventh-Day Adventist Church, Centro Civico Colombiano, Santería Niño de Atocha Botánica, Malaysian Curry House, Perla Ecuatoriana Restaurant, the Korean Health Center, and Elarayan Restaurante Chileano. Smack in the middle of this is Ana's hairdresser, where old Italian ladies, as if commanded by some recondite memory chip, still beehive their hair under conehead dryers. The Elmhurst Hospital emergency room is also good, especially on a Saturday night after a big soccer game piped from Bogotá. A more far-flung array of stabbing victims would be hard to find. Harried nurses call out the names of the evening's victims: “Gonzalez! … Patel! … Chu! … where the hell is Romanov's chart?”

These are a different crew from the immigrants my parents and grandparents came in with. My people, once they got on the boat—they weren't going back. It was a one-way ticket. America was their grail; they were here for the long haul. Now the world's smaller, it's sixty-nine cents a minute to talk to wherever at the
larga distancia
parlors on Roosevelt Avenue, and the new people aren't even called immigrants but “trans-nationals.” You walk to Main Street, where the Hasidim are, and see that assimilation—becoming American—no longer seems the sole purpose of living in Queens. Maybe there are enough Americans. Indeed, sometimes,
in the grip of postmodernist ennui, it seems to me as if these new people, by their very apartness—their refusal to buy the American deal lock, stock, and barrel—are the only fully fleshed-out humans around, the only ones with a palpable past, present, and potentially heroic future. They have rolled the dice with their lives; now the epic of New York belongs to them.