Buried on Avenue B (12 page)

 

CHAPTER 28

SOL KLINGER IS
not one to take unnecessary risks. Although the early-bird special at Sabia's runs a generous hour and a half, from 5:00 to 6:30, he arrives at 4:45. When O'Hara walks in twenty minutes later, she finds him settled in a corner, the only customer in the place, gnawing a breadstick and studying the menu for loopholes.

“To old friends,” says O'Hara after the waiter drops off her Amstel.

“To Bunny ‘Schoolboy' Levin,” says Klinger, “inch for inch, pound for pound, the toughest Jew I've ever known.” In his mid-eighties, Klinger still has some hair and some heft and some light in his eyes. Swathed in high-end fabrics, reading glasses dangling from a gold loop attached to a neck chain, he looks prosperous and relaxed in a way that makes the connection between the two obscenely transparent.

“I guess that poor fellow at Sweet Tomatoes didn't stand a chance,” says O'Hara.

“I'm not talking about an old fart with a quick temper,” says Klinger, waving away whatever O'Hara may have heard with the stub of his breadstick. “I'm talking about a kid who as a junior at South Newark High School beat a leading contender for the lightweight title. The next day, his classmates carried him around the playground on their shoulders. Can you imagine how good that must have felt? I can't, and I've been trying for seventy years.”

Klinger reaches into a leather portfolio and drops an ancient publicity shot on the table. “This is from '37,” he says, “before they banned religious symbols. Bun was seventeen.”

Seventy years ago in a Newark gym, Levin adopts the classic pugilistic crouch. His thickly muscled arms and legs are poised for action, his taped fists ready to fly. But as always, it's the eyes. Levin's are soulful and belligerent and calm to the point of indifference, as if quietly informing his opponent that they can settle this now in the ring or some other time on a street corner, it's all the same to him. Sewn on the leg of his silk trunks is the Star of David, and written in script across a bottom corner of the picture “Bunny ‘Schoolboy' Levin,” although with his glistening black hair and fearless eyes, Levin looks more like John Garfield than a schoolboy.

Kids grew up faster then, thinks O'Hara. Then she remembers the scene, however contrived, on the wall of the Chelsea gallery, and dismisses the thought as nonsense.

“At seventeen, Bunny already had twelve pro fights. Three at the old Garden, two at Saint Nichols Arena on Sixty-Sixth Street. I know because I saw them all.”

“You two been friends since then?”

“Friends? He was the neighborhood hero—‘Schoolboy Levin.' I was just Klinger, an actual schoolboy. I tagged along as much as he would tolerate it, and I helped him out. Like most parents, Bunny's didn't approve of the sweet science, even if it helped pay the rent. So I stowed his gear at my place. Our apartment was on the second floor. On his way to a fight, he'd stop below my window and whistle. Then I'd lower his bag down to him in the street.”

“Did Bunny ever mention spending time with a young boy from New York, about nine years old, blond hair, a slight limp?”

“I don't think he'd been in New York in years. After the war the GI plan took him to college. Then like all of us, he got married. His wife's family made disposable plastic gloves, the kind women wore at night over moisturizers. He grew the business, moved to the suburbs, and was lucky enough to sell it when it was still worth something. Me, I became a lawyer, did even better. It wasn't until we met again down here that we became more like friends. Equals, almost. The only reference to a kid I can remember had something to do with helping some broad pay for her son's tuition, but I don't recall her being from New York.”

“Financially, was Ben okay at that end?”

“He was fine. Ben didn't get excited about money. You saw his place. It would fit in my garage. For him, it was about proving something, making a point. The rappers on my grandsons' CDs, they all sing about ‘representing.' That's what Bun was doing too. He represented the corner of East Fifth and Sparrow in South Newark. That's why we all loved him.”

“What was your reaction to the news?”

“I was devastated. How do you think I'd feel? And not that I have any right to judge, not knowing all the details, but I was disappointed. In seventy years I'd never seen him back down. It wasn't his style. I don't think he could if he wanted to.”

“So you think the suicide was staged?”

“By who?”

When the waiter returns to the table, O'Hara orders a burger, Klinger the salmon. “Could I get a salad with that?” he asks.

“The special doesn't come with a salad, sir. It comes with rice or a potato and the vegetable. Would you like to order a salad?”

“That's okay.”

“Come on, Sol,” says O'Hara, “order the goddamn salad.”

Klinger scowls at O'Hara and turns back to the waiter. “When you get back to the kitchen, if you see some lettuce and a couple tomatoes and maybe a mushroom or two, could you just drop them in a little pile on the plate next to the fish?”

“A little pile?”

“Yeah.”

“That sounds a lot like a salad, sir.”

“Maybe to you.”

The waiter glances at O'Hara in a plea for empathy, but O'Hara looks past him at the empty restaurant. With its long mahogany bar and vintage movie posters, it could be in any city in America except New York.

“At the end,” asks O'Hara, “was he still all there? Mentally.”

“He was fine. Still did the crossword in ink. It's not like boxing today. Those guys knew how to slip punches. His curse was that he still could fuck.”

Why do Jews always find a way to talk about good things like they're bad? What is that about?

“An eighty-seven-year-old widower who can still fuck is just about guaranteed to go out like a schmuck. It would be okay if Bun would content himself with the old widow upstairs, but of course that's not what he has in mind. Who does? He wants someone younger. Believes a young broad could still want him, can't help but believe it, so he ends up paying some stranger's kid's tuition. Which pissed off his own daughter, and I don't blame her.”

“You remember anything about this woman?”

“Actually, I think there were two. All I remember is that one had bad skin.”

“How did you know that?”

“Bun must have told me. His point, I guess, was that she could actually care for him. She was young, too young for him, but she had her flaws too. Hey, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe she did like him, and I'm just jealous. I've been jealous of him my whole life.”

 

CHAPTER 29

AFTER DINNER, O'HARA
and Klinger dawdle under an awning in front of Klinger's enormous pearl gray Lexus.

“I get a new one every three years. That and a colonoscopy.”

“Sol, I hope you're good for half a dozen more . . . of each.”

“Darlene. It was a pleasure.”

It takes Klinger ten minutes to climb in, buckle up, and back out. When his taillights recede, it's all of 5:45, and O'Hara still has way too much daylight to safely navigate. A couple blocks up is a twenty-screen cineplex. Hugging the sides of the buildings for shade, O'Hara walks the three deserted blocks to the ticket window, where she is reminded that a cineplex is a theater showing a long list of movies none of which you want to see. Of the wealth of shitty options, the only time that works is
I Am Legend
at 6:25, but she can't get herself to step up to the glass window and pull the trigger.

Don't be a schmuck, Darlene
, she tells herself in her best imitation of Wawrinka doing Klinger.
Buy the frigging ticket, get yourself a nice bottle of pop and a bucket of popcorn, and lay low till the sun goes down
. But as enticing as they are, two dark, sugary, salty refrigerated hours aren't enough to get her to take $11 out of her wallet and hand it over to Will Smith. Not in this lifetime. She'd as soon get mugged.

Next door is a sprawling bar, and when she steps in, she wonders if it's owned by the same guy who owns the Italian place. Rather than old movie posters, the walls are plastered with legendary jocks, not the sweaty battle-tested undergear, which would actually be kind of interesting, but athletes and assorted memorabilia, not that it makes any difference, since it all feels like it was ordered out of the same restaurant/bar decorating catalogue. O'Hara revisits in her mind the wonderful old photograph Klinger showed her of Levin and juxtaposes it with the gallery shot of the still nameless kid. Levin, the poor first-generation immigrant who wandered into a gym and learned to throw and slip punches, would have liked the kid who wandered into Tompkins Square Park and learned to roll a joint and do an ollie. How could he not have? He was an updated version of himself—same balls, same attitude, Street Urchin 2.0. If only the old man had paid tuition for the kid instead of the son of some gold digger, maybe things would have turned out better for both of them.

Unfortunately, nursing a beer is not part of O'Hara's skill set. When her empty hits the coaster, it's 6:15, and the thought of whiling away the evening in generic limbo is less appealing than
I Am Legend
. She remembers the museum by the airport and, on her way to dinner with Klinger, passing a bus stop with an ad for a show there of old-time circus photographs from the turn of the century. She calls the museum from her barstool and learns that on Thursdays, it's open till 8:00.

Twenty minutes later an elderly volunteer hands her a metal pin and a brochure and directs her to the two rooms devoted to the photography of Frederick Whitman Glasier. According to her reading material, Glasier, a failed jeweler, opened a portrait studio in Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1901. Two years later, the Barnum & Bailey Circus came to Brockton, and Glasier spent most of the next thirty years as its semiofficial in-house photographer. “If you ask me,” says the woman at the front desk, “he's better than Ansel Adams. And do you know that all his pictures were taken on glass plates, so that they were composed upside down?”

In their heyday, circus companies toured 150 cities and towns a year. A private train pulled into the station, and the whole town watched the animals and performers parade to the fairgrounds, where in six hours sledgehammer-wielding crews put up a canvas big top capable of covering 12,000. In beautiful set shots, Glasier captures the unfolding spectacle, but O'Hara is particularly taken by his portraits, which are displayed with snippets of Barnum's original hyperbole. There are the acrobatic Hugony sisters, “marvels of strength and agility,” and the Marvells themselves, contortionists who perform “terpsichorean originalities and odd feats of gyrations with curious and comic episodes.” There are the Upside Down Bros., who walked down stairs on their heads, and the iron-jaw acts like the Kimball Twins, who flew through the air suspended by their teeth and performed “daring acts of dental dexterity.”

O'Hara can't help but appreciate that none of these gymnasts, contortionists, or aerialists are skinny girls. They've all got asses and tits and thighs proudly presented in skintight outfits that even a century down the road are blatantly erotic. The pictures of these intrepid young women remind O'Hara of her visit to Coney Island and her conversation in Williamsburg with Jennifer Miller, the bearded woman who was once a regular at the sideshow. When O'Hara asked Miller why she grew and kept her beard, she said she didn't want to bow down. In a way that only a teenager can be, she was an impassioned feminist, and just coming out as a lesbian, and didn't see why she should. The cost to Miller of keeping that beard has been biblical. It's pushed her to the margins and made a very smart woman all but unemployable, and maybe she's insane for hanging on to it, but thank God, thinks O'Hara, for young girls with balls. And maybe, thinks O'Hara, that little Coney Island pimp was not entirely full of shit when he was spouting about the value of seeing the iconography against which you will inevitably be judged. Clearly these circus performers were among the first feminists, and if no one is willing to be a freak, nothing ever changes. Without them, for all she knows, there'd still be no females in homicide.

One picture given a prominent spot in the room catches a young aerialist named Maude Banvard as she flies high above the Brockton fairgrounds in 1907. O'Hara sees that fundamentally she's no different from a seventeen-year-old Benjamin Levin stepping into the ring at the smoke-filled St. Nichols Arena in 1937, or Axl Rose O'Hara stepping onstage with the Flat Screens at the Ukrainian Center last week. As Klinger said about his old friend, it wasn't about the money, it was about proving something to their friends and themselves. At some point, all these kids decided that the moments of their lives were worth fighting for, and they weren't dissuaded by the fact that the odds were stacked against them, or that their mothers were worried about them, or that half the world thought they were schmucks for even trying.

O'Hara is still standing transfixed in front of the photo when another old volunteer—this town is full of free old labor, she thinks—taps her on the shoulder and tells her the museum is about to close. On her way out, O'Hara passes through room after room filled with art with a capital “A,” including countless old
Madonna and Child
s and even a bona fide Rembrandt and a Rubens. Ringling, figures O'Hara, must have been overcompensating, trying to acquire some class and distance himself from his old cohort Barnum and “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

 

CHAPTER 30

WHEN O'HARA LEAVES
the museum, it's still ridiculously early, but she is resigned to call it a night, pick up some beer and take it back to the Marriott, where she can pull the shades and ponder the possible scenarios that would connect a pugilistic prodigy from South Newark and a precocious street urchin from the East Village. O'Hara could get the beer anywhere, of course, but loyalty to her favorite Florida bodega takes her back across the bridges to Longboat Key.

On her second visit to Publix, O'Hara feels like a regular. She shakes loose a shopping cart, and like a dog who knows his route and favorite pissing spots, it tugs her to the happy aisle of beer. Here the choices are more reliable than at the cineplex, and as she gently lowers two six-packs of Amstel into the front of the cart, she notes their resemblance to Park Slope twins.

To prolong her stay, rather than a realistic anticipation of appetites and needs, O'Hara decides to gather ingredients for her next few breakfasts and evening snacks and pushes off into more nutritious regions. At the wall of cereals, O'Hara pulls up beside a tall, stooped man sporting a gray cardigan with suede patches on the elbows. Like O'Hara, he has his eye on the Rice Krispies. “After you,” he says.

“No way,” says O'Hara. “You were here first.”

“I couldn't care less,” says the old man. He sounds as if his mouth is full of gravel, and wears horn-rimmed glasses. “I insist.”

“Well, okay then.”

Based on his lovely lonely chivalry, O'Hara makes him as the surviving half of a once happy couple, the so-called lucky one who fooled the actuaries and dodged the cancers and now gets to fend for himself on the sunny shores of the Gulf of Mexico. O'Hara should slip him Sol's number so they can redeem their coupons and watch each other's backs at Sweet Tomatoes.

“Happy shopping,” says O'Hara with a parting smile.

“The same to you, young lady.”

Is there a surface as frictionless as well-polished linoleum? When the economy implodes for real, they can turn the old grocery stores into skateboard parks. O'Hara rolls her cart down the wide aisles, sometimes adding items indiscriminately, other times mulling the obscure differences between rival brands as seriously as if she were buying a car. Among other things, she buys reduced-fat milk, whole-wheat English muffins, and aluminum foil. Blue tostada chips, salsa, and a sketch pad. Bananas, blackberries, and five fresh pink Florida grapefruits. And since grapefruits don't cut themselves, she has no choice but to head toward housewares to find a serrated knife. In the course of her circumnavigations, O'Hara makes several sightings of the old man and his cart with its handful of items, always in the smallest quantities available. Whenever their paths cross, O'Hara can see how much the old man values each interaction, however brief. She realizes that his excursion to Publix, for which he dressed so nattily, is a high point of his day.

In the aisle with the kitchen utensils, O'Hara rolls up on an attractive woman wearing a kerchief and ankle-length beach cover-up and her daughter of twelve or thirteen. Something about them, their empty cart and aimless meandering sets off her cop's antennae. Based on the woman's loose-fitting outer garment and location in an aisle lined with relatively costly items, O'Hara guesses shoplifters. Reminding herself that she has her own homicide or homicides to deal with and that a high-tech grocery is more than capable of thwarting them on their own, she pushes the pair out of her mind and rolls past them to the knife display. She purchases the second cheapest of four serrated options, adds a toothbrush, dental floss, and SPF lip balm, and heads for the checkout.

Awaiting her turn, O'Hara scans the other checkout aisles for the gentleman shopper and spots him two aisles to the right. In the penultimate spot in line, he places his blue-and-white box of cereal on the conveyor. As he dips to lift another item from his cart, someone behind him in line touches him on his arm just above the patch, and the old man responds with a smile and then a blush. It's the woman with the kerchief and her daughter.

In an instant, the therapeutic benefit of forty minutes in Publix is erased by rage. Even if their target is her favorite grocery store in the continental United States, which it is, a couple shoplifters can be ignored. But O'Hara isn't going to look the other way while some bitch and her ratty-ass daughter prey on a lovely old man in a cardigan who likes Rice Krispies. Fuck that.

The three get through checkout before her, but O'Hara hustles past them as they slowly exit the sliding glass doors. She reaches her car in time to watch in the rearview as the woman and girl follow the old man across the parking lot and linger as he loads two bags into the trunk of a ten-year-old green Cadillac. After the woman touches the man's arm again, he says something that causes her to erupt with glee and nudge her sullen daughter to do the same. Then, to O'Hara's dismay, the old man opens the back door for the girl and the front one for the mother and walks around to the driver's side. When he backs out of his space, so does she.

Even O'Hara, whose mind gravitates toward worst-case scenarios, didn't see the woman working this fast. She figured the woman would get the old man's phone number and leave in her own car, then O'Hara would get her plates and maybe even follow them back to where she lived. Then she could phone in the information to Wawrinka and let the locals decide on the appropriate level of harassment.

Instead, O'Hara follows them west toward Sarasota. For the first time since she arrived, a drawbridge is up. For the next several minutes, as the sun dips into the Gulf, O'Hara looks through the rear window of the Cadillac and watches the gruesome mime unfolding in the front seat. The woman nods and laughs, and again and again reaches across the space between the seats to touch the man on his arm or shoulder. Maybe she'll overdo it so egregiously that even a lonely old man will see through her, but, considering his trip to Publix is the highlight of his week, what are the chances of that?

O'Hara feels herself teetering out of control. What exactly does she intend to do, and what good will come of it? And what if something goes wrong, as it so easily could? She's already earned a reputation as a loose cannon. Does she think her career would survive a major fuckup a thousand miles outside her jurisdiction?

But watching passively from five feet away is impossible for her. She unclasps her seat belt and reaches for the door. To the extent that she has a plan, this is it: She is going to walk up to the driver's side of the Cadillac, flash her badge, and come up with some pretext to get the old man out of the car. Then, while the woman sweats it out inside, she'll explain to the old man exactly what kind of trash he is dealing with. But as O'Hara opens the door of her car and puts one foot down on the road, the drawbridge begins to drop in front of them, and the driver in the car behind blows his horn and waves his arms in frustration.

O'Hara decides the location is too chaotic. With the horns blowing, the old man won't be able to hear her and is likely to get flustered. Too much can go wrong. O'Hara hops back into the car and follows them into the shopping circle she drove through the evening of her arrival. Partway round the circle, the Cadillac pulls over and parks. The three get out of the car and walk into an old-timey ice cream parlor, where in the front window some poor high school kid dressed in period garb leans over a marble table and kneads fudge.

The place must be empty. In a few minutes the three are on the bench in front—the mother with a pistachio cone and the girl with an elaborate sundae—and O'Hara witnesses another installment of the twisted charade. The woman has never tasted ice cream this good. The old man has to experience it too. She holds out the cone for him to take a taste. And then another. And then she dabs his chin with her napkin. Yet the couples who walk by take no notice. Is it possible that to a passerby, they seem like a father, daughter, and grandchild enjoying a summer night?

Their treat finished, the happy family traipses back to the car. But instead of heading back to Publix, the Cadillac continues north across the harbor into Sarasota. As the night drops completely, she follows them onto the southbound extension of the Tamiami Trail, with its empty retail spaces and bottom-feeder commerce. They pass tattoo parlors and pawnshops and one macabre shopping plaza where a medical supply store specializing in wheelchairs and walkers sits side by side with a windowless porn emporium offering a 25 percent discount for seniors. Can't beat that for convenience—a bedpan and a porno in one stop.

Quarter of a mile later, the car moves into the right lane and does a U-turn to the northbound side of the road, then turns into the parking lot of a dilapidated motor lodge advertising efficiency apartments starting at $99 a week. O'Hara turns off her lights and follows the car to the back of the building, where the old man parks in front of a ground-floor unit. After a few minutes, the woman and girl leave the car, and when the old man sees that they're safely inside, he pulls out of the dark lot and back onto the Tamiami Trail.

O'Hara, however, isn't going anywhere. She turns off the ignition and reaches into the backseat for an Amstel, stares at the door through which the mother and daughter disappeared, sips her beer. Although the old man hasn't been harmed physically, what she's observed over the last forty minutes is as disturbing as violence. Fucking with the very old seems no less heinous than messing with the very young.

O'Hara drinks a second beer, stares at the curtains in the back window, and thinks about the hard business of facing the end alone. She thinks about the old man in Publix, Levin in his condo, and Gus in his basement, and wonders if that will be her fate too. It certainly looks that way. Her grandmother, near the end of her life, told O'Hara that denial was underrated. Maybe dementia is just a stronger version of the same thing. Vicodin instead of Advil. The beers calm O'Hara slightly, till she sees a figure move past the window, and the thought of the woman inside plotting her next move on the old man.

What torments O'Hara is the realization that nothing can be done to make the old man less vulnerable. O'Hara has the old man's plates; she could get the address, and ask Wawrinka to send someone by his place to warn him, but what can they offer that will enable him to reject the overtures of a younger woman who seems to care about him when his only other option is to sit in his little box, lock the door, and wait to die? O'Hara should do the same thing. She should go back to her little box, turn on the ball game, and drink the rest of her beer. But she can't do it either.

O'Hara scans the lot for a car that might belong to the woman, but it's empty. Did the two take a bus out to Longboat Key on spec? The building doesn't seem to have an office or a front desk. As O'Hara tells herself to do the sane thing and leave, a tiny econobox, dwarfed by the dorsal fin of a pizza sign on the roof, screeches into the back lot. When a pimply teen hops out with a greasy box, O'Hara steps out too.

“I was just out for a smoke. I see you got my pie.”

“Room nineteen? Mushroom and sausage?”

“Congratulations. You actually got it right this time. What do I owe you?”

“Seventeen ninety-five.”

“And still nice and hot. Excellent.” She gives the kid $25 and waits for him to leave, then takes the box to her car. What does she intend to do? Her legs are shaking because the box rattles on her lap. She reaches behind her and pulls the tube of aluminum foil from one of her grocery bags, removes and wraps up every slice except one, and drops them on top of her groceries. Then she rips a piece of paper from her rental agreement and writes the woman a note.

“If you ever talk to the old man again, I will hunt you down like the whore you are.”

Is that it? No. Not quite. She pulls out the one slice still left in the box, takes three large bites, and drops it back inside, facedown. Then she slips the note into the box, gets out of the car, and walks toward Unit 19.