Life and Death of a Tough Guy

To Sophie Again

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

ONE •
IN THE GANG

TWO •
PROHIBITION—NO PROHIBITIONS

THREE •
LEAD SOLDIER

FOUR •
THE OFFICE

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Copyright

Downstairs was the street. Downstairs was the Bogeyman with his bag, Jack the Ripper with his knife.

The boys on the street yelled at him when he walked by with his mother:

He was only four and his mother’s explanations confused him. The boys were bad. God didn’t like bad boys.

God was the Man who lived in the sky.

There was another Man who lived in the red house with the cross on top.

His mother said he couldn’t go into the red house.

When he was five his father began sending him on errands. The boys would try to stop him; he was a good runner. Once they trapped him and said, “Hey, Joey. Wanna shoe shine?” They polished his high button shoes with watermelon rind, and laughing, shined up his face, too, for good measure.

Downstairs was the street. At night from the front windows of his family’s flat, he watched the silent lamplighter lighting huge white cats’ eyes in the darkness. Everywhere there were eyes. Down in the cellar, the coal in the bin glittered with many eyes; he hated to go down there. “The eyes of the devil,” his mother would say as she filled the coal scuttle. He knew who the devil was — the devil was the Man who lived in cellars and burned up all the dead people.

Of all these things Joey thought when he lay in bed with his younger brother Danny, listening to the street’s mysterious and frightening sounds. A woman crying, a man shouting, the whistle of a tugboat from the river, brought up images of the bad boys, of Bogeyman and Jack the Ripper, of strange men called God and Devil.

Street of the dark voices. It could come through all the locked doors and there was no hiding. It would find him.

He didn’t know that one day this street of a hundred fears would narrow down to two rows of red brick tenements and that instead of answering to the name of Scarey Cat, he would nod indifferently at the respectful greetings of mobsters and gunmen. “That Joey Case’s tough,” they would say of him. “He’s one of the toughest guys in the whole West Side.”

“Tough and smart, guy. Don’t forget the smart. He’d be pushin’ up the daisies long ago if he wasn’t smart.”

That summer, his name was still Joey Kasow, and the man he would become was still far away on the other side of the night.

“
Yussele
— Joey,” his mother said in Yiddish, looking up from her sewing machine. “You cannot stay in the house a whole summer long, hiding in corners.” Her voice was soft and tender for her first-born. On the kitchen floor his younger brother Danny played with some clothespins, his baby sister Sarah sucked on her bottle in the crib.

He stood there with hanging head, his dark blond hair still wet from a dousing in the kitchen sink. He wore no shirt, no stockings, only blue knee pants, his feet in scuffed shoes with soles so thin that when he walked on the summer sidewalks he felt the heat coming through.

“Have you lost your face, my dear one? Let me see your face,” she coaxed him.

His gray eyes were the same color as his mother’s. She kissed him, then stared at the drawn window shades. Spider webs of light glowed in the cracks.

“You will be six in another month,
Yussele
,” she said. “You will go to school. You must learn to play with other children. Go downstairs and play,” she begged him. The boy’s eyes were as wet as his hair. She, too, felt like crying.

Downstairs, were the streets of the Irish. The saloons on the corners, the bums sleeping in the hallways, the gangsters robbing the stores on Ninth Avenue. When Mrs. Radisch, the butcher lady on Thirty-Eighth Street had first told her that the neighborhood was called
der Teufel’s Kuche
— Hell’s Kitchen — Mrs. Kasow had smiled, thinking that everybody wanted to fool a greenhorn. She knew better now. The streets were no place for an innocent Jewish child.

Her husband laughed at her. “You are making a woman out of him with your salty tears and your stupid pity!” So spoke her husband. He was becoming a half-Irisher himself, she would think; yes, he could be brave, he was big like a peasant, with hands like the blocks of wood he cut through with his carpenter’s saw, and a tongue in his head sharper than any steel.

She got up from the sewing machine and embraced her son, whispering, kissing his cheeks. But when she managed to lead him to the door she felt as if she had betrayed her oldest-born. She closed the door between them and thought with tears in her eyes: so, we drive our own flesh and blood into the cruel world.

The boy outside sobbed. He knocked and when she didn’t open the door, he banged it with his fists; he started to shout. She let him in. But that same week, cowed by her husband’s arguments, the door remained shut.

The door was painted dark blue. It had a white china doorknob that gleamed like a cold and monstrous eye…. Joey began to scream. From one of the flats on the floor, a woman hurried over to him. She said, “What’re you cryin’ fer?” And when he didn’t reply she murmured to herself. “Good Lord, always cryin’ them Jews.”

He flattened against the wall. The woman said, “I’m not gonna hit you, sonny. Why doncha go downstairs and play?”

Mutely, he stared at her.

“Don’t wanna do that, huh? Lemme see — you like pigeons? Can’t talk, huh? Now you go up onna roof and see the pigeons. Me boy’s up there with his pigeons. Gwan! See the pigeons, don’t hang around cryin’ or I’ll belt you one for sure.”

When she was gone, he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to go on the roof. The roof was bad. Mama is bad, Mama is bad, he singsonged to himself, climbing to the top floor. There, an iron ladder angled up steeply to a square of blue summer sky. To his worried eyes, the ladder was a stair with big holes.

Fall-through holes! Mama is bad, he chanted to himself and ascended the iron ladder. Stepping out on the roof, he was blinded by the sun. It spread, a yellow sky in size, then shrank, becoming round like the fire in the stove when his mother lifted a lid, a yellow circle. Big! He was overwhelmed by the bigness of the sun and the blue bigness of the heaven, the tarred tenement roofs stretching far and wide, another city in the sky, the pigeons flying. Then as a voice hollered, the universe contracted: three faces were watching him.

Two boys of fifteen or sixteen sat in the shade of a lean-to of white pine planks propped up against the chimney, while a small boy ran over to Joey, hollering.

“What yuh doin’ on my roof, Scarey Cat?” Joey knew him. His name was Georgie.

Georgie scowled. He was Joey’s age but bigger. He had stripped out of his clothes except for a pair of homemade underpants cut out of his father’s old Sunday shirt, a gaudy green silk shirt striped in red. As he brandished a fist under Joey’s nose, he looked like a miniature flyweight. His black hair was cropped close, a bulletheaded boy whose right fist was fanning a steady breeze into Joey’s face.

“His mudder said,” Joey was stammering.

“Whose mudder?”

Joey pointed at the two big boys under the lean-to.

“I know’m,” the pigeon-flyer said. “He’s on my floor. Hey, jewboy, should we let yuh stay? Or kick yuh off.”

“Let’m stay,” his friend said. “He’s jus’ a lil squirt — ”

“Since when d’you love the Jews? I thought your name was Dineen?”

“Go fly a kite, Flaherty!”

They let him stay there, out in the bright sun. A limitless no-man’s land stretched between Joey and the three of them sitting cozy under the lean-to. After a while he dared lift his head to the flock of pigeons flying as if a single gray wing supported them all. Their easy motion was hypnotic. His arms lifted from his sides, his fingers fluttered. Up, up, up, he flew from Flaherty and Dineen and Georgie. Georgie couldn’t catch him, nobody could ever catch him.

Up, up.

Safe.

He was startled when Flaherty yelled, “Hawk!” Flaherty ran towards the coops on the roof. He picked up a twenty-foot bamboo pole and circled it in the sky. The white decoy rag tied to the tip-end waved, a warning flag. Dineen cursed, Georgie hopped up and down, shaking his fists. And far up in the blue reach, too high in dazzle and sky to be a pigeon, a black speck was becoming larger. Still, the flock coasted in the blue, not a worry in their heads. “Come down!” Flaherty implored them, “Come down you dumb bastids!” Three or four pigeons flew lower to investigate the white rag. Flaherty slowly sank the pole to the roof wall. A dozen pigeons alighted, nodding their gray heads, as the black speck now clearly a bird, sped down the blue racetrack of the sky.

Joey gaped, his mouth a flytrap. Flaherty lifted the bamboo again, the white rag fluttered. Rag? It was a leader, a mighty white pigeon to be followed when it dropped to the roof wall and skipped over to the coops. The pigeons crowded onto the wired top of a coop, stupid birds of a sudden, the flash of brain lost, lost with the mighty white pigeon. Flaherty’s pole shooed them into the coop.

He was too quick, too nervous with the pole. Two pigeons escaped him. They flew up from the roof. Higher, higher. The hawk wheeled slowly, thirty stories up. Flaherty wiggled his pole but the two pigeons, as if missing the numbers and safety of the flock, giddy at the two of them alone, flew up and up and up. The hawk dropped, a feathered stone. “Dumb bastids!” Flaherty wailed, for the two pigeons didn’t see the hawk. City birds, coop-dwellers, they were too petted and spoiled to know a hawk when they met one.

The hawk was no longer falling through the sky, but climbing, flying with his prey toward the Jersey Palisades. The two joined birds became one bird, a black speck again, a colorless dot so tiny it might have been an air bubble in the sky.

Flaherty lured the surviving pigeon into the coop. His unhappy eyes fixed on Joey’s tilted head. “Hoodoo,” he grumbled. “Ain’t been a hawk around all summer.”

“Ain’t his fault,” Dineen tried to say.

Flaherty called to Georgie: “Kick the jewboy off the roof! Bust’m one, Georgie! Damn hoodoo!”

Georgie ran over to Joey, he hit him in the face, socked him in the jaw. Joey’s arms stayed against his sides. A third fist hit him high on the forehead and Georgie faded out of his vision. Georgie vanished, hidden in the pain smoking out of those swinging hard little fists.

Dineen pulled Georgie off. Flaherty shouted insults at his friend. One helluva Irishman that one was, Flaherty informed the world. Joey heard voices, sound, not meaning.

“Fight back!” Dineen was shouting at Joey, backslapping at Georgie to keep the blackhaired batter away. “God damn it, doncha hear me?” He grabbed Joey’s shoulders and shook him while Georgie circled the two of them like a terrier knocked off from his victim.

“Give the lil jewboy a big kiss,” Flaherty jeered at Dineen.

“Kiss my ass!”

“Wait’ll I tell the gang!”

Dineen cursed him and he cursed the limp boy in his hands. “Fight back, damn you!” But he might have been talking to a bundle of old rags.

“Kiss’m,” Flaherty advised mockingly.

“Kiss’m!” Georgie echoed.

Dineen slapped Joey across the face. “Fight or I’ll knock your head off!”

While the mocking chorus sang at him, “Kiss’m, kiss’m!”

“I’ll throw you off the roof, damn you!” Dineen hollered, and suddenly he picked up the boy and carried him to the roof wall. Christ, Dineen thought, he’d show those mutts who was kissing jewboys. Over the edge, he lifted the hysterical boy.

Joey saw the bottom world hurling up through space at him like an elevator car gone mad and then with a dizzy speed sliding down on cables that might have been attached to the intestines in the sinking pit of his stomach. Dazzling white sheets flapping in the breeze, red brick walls, back yards. Down, down, down. No hands seemed to be holding him above this awful bottom world. “Mama!” he screamed.