Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (3 page)

At stickball, with a bat wagging in his fists, cigarette dangling from his lips, he shot off his mouth at some scared kid whom he'd coerced into a game of pitching in. “C'mon, ya moron!” he screeched at the kid. “Throw me something I can hit! C'MON!”

When he spotted my approach, his face grew grave, he turned
away from the pitch, and the ball bounced off his arm as he tossed the cigarette aside to aim his bat at my forehead.

“C'mere,” I said, smiling. He swung. The bat broke against my arm with a loud crack. I laughed. To this day I can feel my hand clamped on his hair, slamming his head into cement studded with glass shards. Had a broken bottle neck going for his eye when hands from behind pulled me off as others hauled him to his feet and hurried him away, bawling, blood gushing through his fingers. Never saw him again.

Other times, I broke teeth. One guy's face exploded against my fist. Another with a knife out, who'd picked on my brother, got beat to a pulp outside a pizza joint, against a car. Once, this huge baboon named Fat Joe put out word on the street that he was gunning for me. I put word back that we should meet in a dead end off the Concourse at such and such a time. He brought an entourage, who stood silent witness as I turned his ape face into a swollen mask of blood.

 

On a family visit to Uncle Arnold's place in the Castle Hill Projects, we brought big bags of White Castle hamburgers, quarts of Coca-Cola. Cousin Dennis had just returned from serving a stretch. At the time he and his brother Harvey were engaged in heroin dealing, car theft, robberies, and other felony crimes. Ivy, another brother—in all there were nine—had a serious monkey on his back. Entering their home felt like crossing over the threshold of a demonic haunt where crazed devils lived. The edginess of that household was amazing.

While my Aunt Ray sat in the dining room screeching that Arnie should drop dead, Arnie and my father—in full sight of Ray and her circle of sympathetic girlfriends—enjoyed the living room, oblivious to her rants. Arnie wore boxer shorts, wifebeater tee, and
house shoes, while my father looked real sharp in an Italian knit, sharkskin slacks, and Florsheim gator loafers.

They blew smoke rings on fat White Owl cigars, remonstrated about lost bets, and argued back and forth about the Yankees. Sometimes their voices dropped and they talked about things I wasn't meant to hear. Bored, I tried wandering down the hall to my cousins' room but Pop's voice cracked like a whip above my head: “Hey, dummy! Where you think you're going?”

“I'm bored. I wanna go see my cousins.”

“Get your ass over here NOW!”

“Let 'im go see them pieces of shit,” said Uncle Arnold. “It'll be a good warning to him.”

“YOU'RE THE PIECE OF SHIT, NOT YOUR SONS!” Ray shrieked. Her bottle brunette big-hair girlfriends, in pantsuits, nodded in accord.

“Awright,” my father said. “But if they try to give you any dope, you let me know. I'll go in there and knock them dumbheads off. You morons in there hear me?”

From my cousins' room came laughter.

“Keep your nose clean!” my father warned me.

“Yeah, sure,” I said insolently and knocked on the door. Heard Dennis call: “Who's that?”

“It's me.”

“Hey, Cousin Alan! C'mon in, man!”

I entered, found them in their Skivvies, stretched on cots, smoking Camels, having themselves a little chitchat, or plotting heists.

“Cousin Alan!” said Dennis. “How's it goin', man? Have a seat, relax.”

Down one side of his mouth ran a scar I hadn't seen before.

“It goes,” I said.

“How old're you now? said Harvey. “Fifteen, goin' on fifty?”

They both snickered.

Dennis waved me into a folding chair. “Don't listen to that dummy, Cousin Alan.”

I sat there. And tried hard not to stare. But gawked anyway at the tattoos covering Dennis's arms, chest, shoulders. They hadn't been there before he got sent up and they were a little like the hand-drawn numbers that my mother's friend Ruth—who'd been in Auschwitz—had on her arm. But the tats on Dennis were even more jagged looking, crudely drawn.

Dennis, noticing my stare said, pleased: “You checking these out? I got 'em in the joint.”

“Them's tattoos,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“But I thought Jews don't get those. My mom says Jews don't get buried Jewish if they get those.”

“Yeah,” said Dennis, glancing over at Harvey with a mischievous grin. “Well, I guess I'll worry about that when I'm dead.” They both guffawed.

“Lemme see?” I said.

“Help yourself, Cuz.”

“You got all those doing time?”

“And a couple on the outside.”

Soon after, Dennis got into trouble again and tried to kill the DA's main witness during a trial for a jewelry heist and was sent upstate to Sing Sing. While Harvey, who kept up his end of the heroin trade, slipped a bag of smack to his brother Ivy, who OD'd and died in his mother's bathtub.

For Ivy's funeral, two police bulls brought Dennis down cuffed and dressed in a prison-issue brown suit to say goodbyes. They led him into the chapel by the elbows, a defiant sneer on his face as he peered into his brother's coffin, and then led him out, no chance to speak to anyone.

My Aunt Ray cried and screamed, and my Uncle Arnold looked lost, but out behind the chapel, Harvey, who'd slipped the hot shot to his brother, lounged with his crew, leaned up against a big two-toned, fin-tailed Chevy, and was passing a joint around, the smell of which wafted inside. My father said to me, “C'mon,” and out back we went. Pop walked right up to Harvey and backhanded the joint from his mouth. None of Harvey's crew dared move against Pop. They kept their traps shut and I noted as I scanned their hate-filled gazes (my own hand on the K-55 knife in the side pocket of my jacket) that a lot of them had tats on their hands and arms. This was the late Sixties and ink was already common among gangs.

“C'mon, let's get the hell outta here,” my father said in a tone of utter disdain, and we returned to the chapel.

At the burial, Arnie got the idea that the Kaufman men should take over from the gravediggers, bury our own, even though our own had killed our own. We each took hold of the balancing straps and, on Arnie's cue, eased the coffin down into the hole. Someone lowered too fast, the coffin dropped, my cousin, wrapped in his white burial shroud, spilled out.

Around the grave Aunt Ray, my mother, and other female relatives swooned, screaming, hands to foreheads. My Uncle Arnold ripped open his new silk shirt and howled like an animal. My father stood there, shaking his head, muttering, “Goddamned hopeless, all of 'em.”

I jumped in, followed by my cousin Larry. Brushed the grave dirt from Ivy's eyes and scooped it from his mouth with two fingers. He felt like cold butchered meat. Then we rolled him into the box, sealed it, and I yelled up: “Goddamit! Bury 'im!” The gravediggers tossed in dirt fast and drumming on his coffin. But though I had stuck my very hand into the corpse mouth of a dead drug addict I did not think of it as a warning.

AROUND THIS TIME I FOUND WORK AS A FLOOR sweep and general grease monkey in the Bronx Motorcycle Repair shop on Soundview Avenue. It was the main custom shop for the Angels' chapters of the Northeast, from NYC to Massachusetts, and was run by this guy named Eddie, a gearhead genius who turned cherry full-dress Harleys into chopped hogs with extended forks and with flaming death's heads painted on the peanut gas tanks.

He paid me under the table and fed me take-out shrimp-salad heroes and quarts of chocolate milk. I think he kept me out of pity, because I wasn't much with a wrench, couldn't tell a lug nut from a washer.

The gig was a get-around boon for a tenement-poor sewer rat like me—gave me the bucks to take out my first girlfriend, Kathy, a short, seventeen-year-old mixed Puerto Rican and Greek girl with long black hair down to her waist. Kathy wore stilettos, miniskirts, and tight sweaters with uplift bras that turned her breasts into milk bottle torpedoes.

I belonged, with my brother, to a dead-end crew that had its own storefront clubhouse bankrolled by a nutjob bodybuilder named Paul, where we drank wine, smoked joints, planned trouble, listened to the Four Tops. When I had Kathy in back, on the cot, she'd moan, “Keeese me, Alan! Keeese me, my baby!” I loved rolling and sweating, grinding and upthrusting those breasts into my face. But she wouldn't let me get further than a copped feel, which gave me blue balls so bad I limped.

One day at the motorcycle shop I heard a ground-rumbling roar that sounded like a tank charge by Patton's Third Army and watched as the endless ranks of the Angels rolled up in waves of chrome and fire.

They dismounted, and Eddie, dressed in his usual ragged greasy jeans, black boots, and ripped T-shirt, stepped out to greet them, mopping his face with a sweat-soaked bandana. He led them into the cavernous shop, introduced me to everyone.

“This here kid's Alan,” he said. “He's Jewish, right? So, his mother was hunted by Nazis in the war. And she survived. Ain't that right, Alan?”

“That's right.” I nodded shyly, avoiding eyes, hands jammed in pockets, shoulders slouched: a big proud strong kid planning to go out for varsity football that fall.

The bikers, fearsome, wild, studied me with interest. Then they parted ranks and up stepped an Angel with long black stringy hair, a grizzled face, and a certain familiar look of intense and torturous intelligence.

He pointed at the armada of hogs parked in neat rows outside. “My name is Jewish Bob,” he said. “That's my bike. You see the sissy bar?” I followed his pointing arm to an iron Star of David welded atop the sissy seat of the baddest chopped Roadster I'd ever seen. It had giant monkey handlebars and chrome everything;
sat so low that cockroaches had to detour around it.

He pulled up the sleeve of his striped jersey and showed me a Star of David tattoo. “You been circumcised, kid?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“No, you ain't. You see this knife?” He slipped one from an ivory scabbard slung on a black garrison belt with a grinning skull buckle. “Look at it. Genuine SS battle blade. My own father took it off a Nazi in World War Two after he shoved a bayonet up his ass. See that swastika on the handle?”

I saw it.

Balancing the knife in one hand, he took hold of the loose hanging tongue of my belt, sliced it off with a lightning stroke, and held it up for all to see.

“Check out this fuggin' foreskin!” he shouted, and the bikers laughed and cheered. “Today he's just got a circumcision, Angel style! Now he's really a man!” And he shouted the Hebrew toast to life: “L'chaim!”

All the grinning bikers pounded me on the back and jostled and made me feel like I belonged. I'd never seen a Jew like Jewish Bob. He seemed like the toughest, craziest Angel. As the day wore on he stripped off his shirt and colors and walked around bare-chested. He danced drunk, dropped some acid, and careened laughing into doors. Back and front he was a roped muscle wall of black tattoos, including what I recognized as the Hebrew word for God, YHWH.

From then on, I had friends among the clubs. One, a sergeant of arms for the New York chapter of the Angels, drove a Dad's Root Beer truck to make ends meet and worked the door as a bouncer for the Fillmore East. Every so often he would pull up in the truck, drop off a few cases of root beer, and hand down guest passes for shows.

One night, I showed up at the concert hall with Kathy and was greeted by a cheerful “What's going on, Alan!” from the Angel bouncer, who let us in for free. This so impressed Kathy that later, at the club, she almost let me go all the way, but not quite, which swelled my nuts so bad I howled.

SUMMER ENDED, I MADE FOOTBALL SQUAD AT A sports powerhouse, the biggest all-boys high in NY, a state penitentiary posing as a school, and eventually became offensive tackle and defensive end on a team heading for the city crown.

One night out with a couple of schoolyard guys in Van Cort-landt Park, passing big gallon jugs of Gallo port back and forth, I felt the universe snap into view. I stumbled, drunk, to the grass and lay with arms and legs akimbo, like an altar sacrifice, smiling at the blazing stars. For the first time in my life, I felt connected, happy, sure that life belonged to me and I to it. And I drank myself unconscious.

From then on, my life's game plan became to someday live by myself in a room stocked to the rafters with bottles of Gallo and books by famous writers.

Once, I met up with a few players from the team at the Killarney Rose, near Fordham Road; guzzled pitchers, and then shots. Completely sloshed, I picked a fight with someone's face and
broke the place up. It was my first drunken brawl. The last thing I recall before passing out was lying with a swollen eye atop an Irish barfly dressed in a brassiere, in her upstairs bedroom, the feel of her stubbly upper lip as I tried to plant a kiss. The next day, sick as a dog, I learned from the others, who'd waited a turn with her, that I'd puked up on her neck as I passed out.

Finally, when my sexual threshold had grown explosive, I sought relief from a Delancey Street whore named Michelle, who worked for a cathouse on the Lower East Side and charged me ten bucks for a half-and-half—a bang and a blow job. My first real try at sex, I could barely get it up. The old nightmares roared back. “Are you tense? Is this your first time?” she asked. I nodded that it was. “Just relax,” she cooed. But I began to obsess about human sacrifice, blonde virgin brides. The obsession with human sacrifice had nothing to do with the act of being blown; it was what my mind threw on the screen as sex occurred—an old obsessive way to buffer reality with twistedness. Still, the anguish it brought was sharp, real. I focused obsessively on a crumb-encrusted fork jammed into a butt-heaped ashtray on the nightstand, overcome by panic that if she saw me staring at it she would apprehend my sudden urge to thrust it into her chest.