Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue (15 page)

You have to love a woman who can do this for you, thought Nathan, and he lied to himself and pretended he meant the pastry. Did he love her? Oh God, don't let me love her.

He had to go. She saw him to the landing of the stairway.

"Don't ever come back," he heard her say. In the dark stairwell, a certain shine on her eyes told him she was crying. "Damn it, why do I do this?" she muttered.

"Do what?" he protested.

"Do what?" she repeated mockingly. "Just don't come back. A great afternoon. We enjoyed it. I'll give you the
torta
if you want. Bring it home to your little girl."

He realized that she was right and walked silently down the steps. Four steps down, and then he turned. "I am going to have to come back. We both know that."

"Yes, and then you'll have to come back again and again and again. And then finally do you know what you will do? The same stupid thing that men always do. You will decide to confess. You will tell your wife everything and beg absolution."

"Jews don't beg for absolution."

"Yes, they do. From their wives. And then she will hate me. And here in my neighborhood will be this probably very nice woman with a beautiful little girl, and they will know everything about me. And they will hate me. Good-bye, Nathan Seltzer." And she turned and started to slam the door shut.

"Wait, Karoline!" he cried out, and she stopped.

"What?"

Perhaps he just couldn't think of anything else to say, something to break the finality of the door swinging shut. She was waiting.

"When you were a child, did your parents send you to swimming lessons?"

"What?"

"You know, did they send you somewhere to learn how to swim?"

"Yes."

"They did?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"The Y."

"The Y?"

"You know, YMCA or YWCA."

Nathan nodded.

"See ya." And she closed the door.

When the Talmud lists the obligation of a father, it lists a few very precise things. It says nothing about being faithful to the mother of his children or—and this was certainly not Nathan's own fault—child. Just a few things. Studying Torah, teaching a craft, going to the YMCA.

Nathan came home fearing he smelled of chocolate buttercream, of butter, of Karoline Moellen. But all Sonia said was, "How is Nusan?" He almost had to recall who Nusan was.

Sonia was very excited. She had had what she regarded as a major breakthrough on her play. "You said it when we first met, remember?"

"What?"

"They never met. They lived in different times. Now I realize how to do it. Emma Goldman moves into this house on Thirteenth Street with her lovers. She realizes that the house is haunted—haunted by—a Mexican woman—named Margarita. Do you see?"

"That could work," said Nathan, realizing there would be new pages to photocopy. He looked at her, at her fleshy, generous body and her long, beautiful fingers. Had he ever noticed how long they were? He must have, but suddenly it seemed he was once again seeing her for the first time. It seemed he had never loved her as much as at this moment—her and their daughter—and he wrapped his long arms around his wife, thinking of everything he was in danger of losing. And to his astonishment, he made love to her. He may have made love to her better than he had ever done before. Would it make her suspicious?

Now he understood that the more sex a man had, the more he wanted. That was why monks refused sex. He used to wonder how they could bear it. When he was a teenager, this was an important topic with his Italian schoolmates. But now he knew that only through abstinence could the sex drive be diminished. Which was a sensible goal, because there was absolutely nothing in human nature as self-destructive as sexual desire.

Nathan got out of bed and looked at his naked body in the mirror. He
felt fit.
Sex would keep him trim. He had been thinking of taking up running to burn off his tellas. But now he had a much better idea. "Do you think I am gaining weight?" he asked Sonia only now because for the first time in months he was confident that he wasn't. Sonia only moaned in response. She was asleep. Nathan returned to the bed and held her, and they slept that way, holding each other.

F
ELIX
, E
L
C
UQUEMANGO,
had been a Puerto Rican for more than ten years. He noted with a sense of accomplishment that when Chow Mein needed an El Dominicano, he completely passed him over and recruited a real Puerto Rican. He was passing in this neighborhood where they didn't like Dominicans. A Dominican selling grass was a link to Colombian cartels. A Puerto Rican selling the same stuff on the same street was a friendly neighborhood dealer. Cuquemango had heard that in the old days even the white people used to deal. Now white people got less excited about Puerto Ricans, not that they knew a Dominican from a Puerto Rican. Lots of people were dealing. There was even a Panamanian working Tenth Street. The job was good money and required no green card. Cuquemango didn't need a green card, nor did he live down on Rivington. He was passing for an East Village Puerto Rican.

But on warm Sundays, Cuquemango liked merengue and he didn't like
plenas.
The Puerto Ricans always complained that merengue was too loud. The casita was theirs, and in the summer it was the best place in New York. It was supposed to remind them of those places in western Puerto Rico where they had never been. But Cuquemango had actually been to them. He landed in western Puerto Rico and had even picked coffee in the mountains and lived briefly with a family in a two-room farmhouse that looked like the casita.

He came from a richer place—richer land but poorer people—in the green fertile valley of the Cibao in the northern Dominican Republic. He often thought of those tough, balding mountains and the green valley floor where the soil underneath was as dark as blood and the turquoise wooden-shingled towns where people cared about one another. That was how he remembered it, anyway. Why was it that the richer the land, the poorer the people? The land in Manhattan was not good. But the people here did well nevertheless, a lot better than in the rich-soiled Cibao.

His family raised eggs. They were the only ones for many miles to raise them, so it was a good business. But not good enough to support twelve children. A Haitian woman once told him, "Always have eggs around you because eggs are life. They have power." It must have been true, because his family had a great number of eggs around them and they kept having babies.

He did always keep a hard-boiled egg on him, which he had the habit of rolling one-handed between the fingers of his right hand. Even hard-boiled, an egg is fragile, and he might have hoped that the delicate egg's presence would force his life to be more gentle. He held it in his hand as he crossed a choppy, foaming sea in a small boat from the Dominican Republic with two dozen other people, scrambling to shore near Aguadilla. Most of the others were sick as they dragged themselves quickly across the night beach to the bush. But Felix was hungry, and he ate his egg. They were all put into a van and taken to the coffee slopes in the Puerto Rican mountains. All for the five hundred pesos he had prepaid in the Dominican Republic. He hated picking coffee and understood that to do anything else, he would have to learn how to be Puerto Rican.

Immigration officers were Puerto Rican, and they could always spot a Dominican. In Santo Domingo, before crossing over, they were schooled in the trip-up words used by the INS. When they hold up the little olive-size green fruits, do not say
"limoncita."
It is
gnipa.
And
le-chosas
are papayas. One day, at a lunch counter ordering pigeon peas and rice, he heard himself say
"guanduks"
instead of
"gandules."
No one caught it, but he resolved to learn how to be completely Puerto Rican—not just the words, but the accent, the haircut, the clothing, the walk. People from the Cibao did not have those giveaway traces of Haitian blood, and with his hair, nose, and lips he could pass. Once he looked and walked and sounded like a Puerto Rican, he moved to San Juan, where the only job he could find was washing dishes in a restaurant owned by Cubans, which clearly marked him as an illegal alien. It took him another four months before he found a job in a Puerto Rican restaurant, a little fish place in Santurce, and successfully passed.

Once his Puerto Rican was good enough, he just got on a plane. It was Christmastime. Puerto Ricans create chaos at Christmastime, filling all the San Juan flights, carrying bags full of pork-filled
pasteles
and bottles of boozy
coquita
and other Christmas things, making noise and traffic on their way to New York to visit their relatives, who then told them that life was good in New York except for the
hijo de puta
Domini-canos who were moving into the neighborhood wearing no socks, eating bananas, and making too much noise.

As long as he was a Puerto Rican, there was no immigration and no passport. He was just another American, a spic in New York, an American spic in the Loisaida. "American Spic" was the title of one of the most famous poems by the neighborhood laureate, Gilberto Banza.

No one in New York was looking for a Puerto Rican dishwasher. Unskilled jobs would mark him as an "illegal alien"—it was not enough to be alien, you were an illegal alien. Everyone was hiring illegal aliens. But Felix had to get a U.S. citizen job, and he had no skills. He found a part-time job as the assistant to a super of a building on Avenue B. Then he met Chow Mein Vega. He started going over to the casita and playing congas for Chow Mein. He had heard that Chow Mein was a big star, and he thought playing congas would earn him. But no one ever seemed to pay Chow Mein Vega anymore.

Felix wanted to go back to the Cibao someday, but only when he had all the money he needed for the rest of his life, because he knew that once he was there, he could not make any more. In the meantime, he had a mother in the Dominican who was waiting for money from her son in America.

In those days, there were two Dominican things Felix did not want to do: sell grass on Tenth Street and live on Rivington with the rest of the Dominicans. In time he did both.

Desperate for a job, he wandered down to Rivington Street and on the way, on Grand Street, saw a
HELP WANTED
sign in Jack Bialy's. He took little domes of dough and twirled them with his powdered fingers on a flour-dusted board to make the well, and then he tossed onions into the indentation. The bakery had no wall to hide behind. Customers, owners, and salesclerks could all see him, and he was expected to move fast. No one ever moved faster. Felix could make seventy-five bialies a minute. People would come just to watch him do it. Jack Bialy would pat him on the back admiringly, shake his head, and say, "You are a real
kuchen macher."
Felix didn't like the name because he did not want to be a
kuchen macher,
a bialy maker. This was like the jobs in the Dominican Republic. He earned barely enough money to survive, and he had no possibilities for a better future. He asked for more money, but Jack Bialy just looked sadly at his flour-dusted black shoes and said, "There is no margin, Kuchenmacher. It's sixty cents a bialy. What can I do? But you can eat as many bialies as you want. Take them home." And Felix did, making whole meals of nothing but bialy and hard-boiled egg or sometimes bialy, hard-boiled eggs, and chorizo. Jack asked that on his way home he bring a bag of leftover bialies to his friend Nusan, close by on Rivington Street. Felix would warily climb the stairs and brace himself for the sour smell when Nusan opened the door. Sometimes, especially if he tapped lightly enough on the door, there would be no answer, and he would leave the bag in front of the door and quickly descend the stairs.

Felix came to hate the puffy cushions of chewy bread that Jack Bialy reverently called
bialystock kuchen.
He was not even making money to send to his mother, so he began selling "smoke" on Tenth Street, and then he could send impressive quantities of dollars home. He explained to his mother that he was doing well, doing business in New York with the Jews, a plausible story.

The amount Felix made on Grand Street was minuscule next to what he could make on Tenth Street, and it was likely to remain that way—unless the government suddenly legalized marijuana and outlawed bialies. So Felix, according to Jack Bialy, broke Jack's heart and left. Jack told him that he could have his job back anytime he wanted. And to tempt him, he would go up to Tenth Street where Felix was dealing, arriving in shirtsleeves and suspenders with his flour-dusted shoes, and hand Felix a bag of the loathed bialies. "So you remember your friends," Jack would say. Not knowing what to do with the bialies while he was dealing, he would hide them behind the stoop where he kept his stash of marijuana and a hard-boiled egg. Even Joey Parma had noticed that Jack Bialy was "involved in something."

People continued to call Felix "Kuchenmacher," which inevitably became Cuquemango, or even El Cuquemango. Felix felt that he had not learned how to be a Puerto Rican and moved to America just to be Cuquemango. When he heard someone call him El Cuquemango, he would say angrily, "Felix,
solo Felix.
Okay?" Just Felix.

It was hard to break in on Tenth Street, but the dealers paid good percentages to lookouts. He worked about five hours a night and made more money than he had ever made in his life. This is more than five thousand bialies, he said to himself one night, counting his money and thinking of his old boss. All he had to do was warn when a plainclothes cop came, and they were so obvious that they might as well have worn uniforms. Soon he too was a dealer, and he even helped Ruben take over his spot as lookout. Helping a young Puerto Rican break in on Tenth Street helped to establish Felix as a Puerto Rican. Felix was sending money to his mother, who could see from the amounts that her son was doing well in New York. New York was turning out to be exactly what everyone in the Cibao said it was.

Felix didn't want to be in drugs. Whenever anyone questioned him about it, which was not often because most people preferred not to talk about it, he said, "I know people in the barrio on welfare that eat dog food. That canned shit. I'm not eating no fucking Ken-L Ration, bro'."

But Felix understood that the drug business had no future in this neighborhood. That was why white people were not dealing anymore. The Nazi or the cops or somebody would shut them down. He had to become a real American businessman. He was looking for his chance to prosper the way other immigrants had—like the Italians on First Avenue. He thought opportunities might be found at the casita, if not from music, then farming. Felix was the only one at the casita who knew how to grow crops. When he first came to the neighborhood, he could see that these Puerto Ricans were not like the ones in the island. An island Puerto Rican could grow a whole crop in a back alley—anywhere there was soil. They grew things all over San Juan.

But these Nuyoricans couldn't grow weeds in a sunny lot. Well, they could. In fact, that is mostly what they did. But he showed them how to plant a second crop in between rows, to find crops that helped each other out, that some places were better than others, that wind direction mattered, that creepers and vines could be trained upward to get more space, that growing onions enriched the soil, that laying a mulch of straw saved the low-hanging vegetables, that some crops were grown from seeds and others from planting seedlings. The reality that he did not want to tell anyone was that the one crop that was well suited for this vacant lot in the city would be marijuana.

The tomatoes were coming in—late, but they would ripen into real tomatoes that would be juicy with crisp flesh and the flavor of tomato that had been forgotten by gringos. And the peppers burned hot and were ready for pepper sauce. The corn was growing because corn always grows, but the beans between the rows were not getting enough shoots. The pigeon peas would prosper because they are easy to grow, if he could only convince the Nuyoricans to stop watering them. The banana was not growing and probably couldn't because the roots could not survive winter. He had finally convinced them of the folly of planting coffee at sea level. The flowers—gladiolas and snapdragons, magenta, white, and yellow—were going to do well this year if the heat didn't burn them down.

He could sell these things. Share the profit with the casita. Then he could be a neighborhood businessman instead of just a spic or, to use the longer version favored by Vice President Bush's campaign, a "Hispanic." There were several empty storefronts on Tenth Street. The neighborhood had many new businesses, but most did not last long—a used-furniture shop, an art gallery—East Village—type businesses that were now struggling, with fewer and fewer East Village—type people around. But even though there were always storefronts available, many of the landlords would not rent to Felix because they knew El Cuque-mango was involved in drugs. They would rather leave their storefronts empty a few more years until they got a Japanese restaurant or a boutique selling things that no one had ever wanted before.

But the Weinberger brothers didn't care. They lived in New Jersey and didn't know who was dealing drugs in the neighborhood. They had let shops and apartments go empty for years because the fewer tenants they had, the more valuable the property would be when the money came in to level the blocks, bulldoze them, and build tall luxury apartment buildings with low ceilings. Six floors of tenement held eight floors of luxury. But so far that hadn't happened, and they had given up and started renting again. So they rented Felix a store where he sold flowers and vegetables.

The casita didn't produce very much, and the store was mostly empty. He filled several buckets with gladiolas and snapdragons, which made Joe the florist regularly walk down the block for reconnaissance. Many of Felix's early customers were plainclothes policemen and Drug Enforcement Agency agents who assumed the shop was nothing more than a front for drug traffic and wanted to figure out how it worked. This was unnerving to Felix, who could recognize a federal agent when he saw one.

Jack Bialy came to Felix's store. He brought bialies, which he said were "on consignment." Jack Bialy defined consignment as "Pay me when business picks up." So every day a young Puerto Rican would show up with one dozen bialies for Felix to sell. Nusan, who hadn't been getting bialies since Felix left Grand Street, started appearing at the end of the day, and Felix gave him what he didn't sell, which at first was a dozen. But soon word spread that they were really good bialies, and Felix had to hold one or two back so that he would have something for Nusan. When Joey Parma came in, Felix would not give him a free bialy. If Joey reached for one, Felix would defiantly say, "Sixty cents!" Joey started to get the idea that somehow El Cuquemango, Jack Bialy, and Nusan were involved in some kind of drug ring. He reasoned that "the old tough one," Nusan, was probably the leader.