Manhattan Mayhem (27 page)

Within hearing distance of the sergeant, Private Kelley offered the new man his half tin of coffee. So, when the soldier smiled his thanks and tapped the bottom of the tin with a certain remark, it was all over. The soldier said, “Up your bottom.”

“Up your bottom” instead of “bottoms up.”

Private Jacobs never swore. He was raised Orthodox. But after subduing the German fink and stripping him of his stolen fatigues and tying his wrists and ankles, Izzy and Mike Kelley shuffled him ten yards out from the encampment and sat him on a fallen tree. Then Sergeant Samuel Rabinowitz cored out the enemy’s heart with the Colt Commando .38 that had belonged to Alfred Herschel Rabinowitz in World War I. Rocking from one foot to the other, Izzy said he wished he could have done the job. The führer himself had ordered any enemy soldier caught in a German uniform executed on the spot. What was good for
the goose, Sergeant Rabinowitz said. His squad members went on with their business, but with a fresher fear in their eyes.

It was only five years earlier that Sammy Rabinowitz and Mike Kelley had sat in Izzy’s bedroom listening to the jazz guitar of Eddie Condon on twelve-inch 78s while putting together model airplanes, these boys whose fourteenth birthdays were all less than six weeks apart. Mike said Eddie Condon was deaf in one ear, and Izzy said he was crazy. How could he play like that, then?

Sammy’s model was a B-17 Flying Fortress his uncle with the shakes had given him. He also surprised Sammy with the latest issue of
Model Airplane News.
The other boys were jealous of Sammy’s good fortune and wouldn’t crack a page. Izzy just plopped the magazine on top of a beat-up issue of
Air Trails
on the bed next to the card table.

Izzy and Mike Kelley had only gliders to work on. Izzy told Sam they found the glider kits in the alley behind Mr. Gessel’s toy shop on Orchard Street. Mike sent Sam a shake of his head that Izzy didn’t see. It wasn’t the first time their friend had lifted something that wasn’t his.

The apartment was on the walk-up’s fifth floor, his bedroom window shoved up for air. The problem started when Izzy’s mother came home from work early from the laundry on Avenue B that afternoon. When she opened Izzy’s door and smelled what she smelled and then looked at the bottles on the table, she went bananas. The labels said
Airplane Dope.
To her, that was what Benny Goodman’s drummer got arrested for, that what’s-his-name Gene Krupa, who had sleepy eyes and regularly dropped his sticks in the middle of a song.

Izzy was sitting on the far side of the table. That meant he was out the door last, catching a volley of slaps on his head and shoulders from his mama. Even the sound of feet pounding down the stairs didn’t mute the noise from Mrs. Jacobs as she tore apart her son and daughter’s room, the little girl who had to sleep perpendicular at the foot of Izzy’s bed because her own room was so small. When the boys reached
the sidewalk, Sammy spotted the glint of two glass bottles exiting Izzy’s window, scoring the clear blue sky while floating on the high wails of that
meshuga
woman.

The boys ran over to Tompkins Park and collapsed on the grass, laughing. That is, until Sammy Rabinowitz said what he stupidly said. “Izzy’s mother is a dope. Izzy’s mother is d-o-p-e-y!” He said it and said it, caught up in the giggles.

So Izzy naturally had to bust him one. Then Sammy busted him back but was quicker, turning Izzy’s nose and lips a meaty, swollen red. Maybe it was time. Maybe they had worn each other out from their differences before. From that day on, Isadore Jacobs and Sammy Rabinowitz avoided each other as much as they could, trading mild insults when they passed in school or on the street.

Seventh Precinct in the Lower East Side was the next-to-smallest precinct in Manhattan, but it was the neighborhood, and Sam was glad to walk a beat there when he was nineteen, watching out for old people and shopkeepers and little kids who played too long in the dim light of dusk. It’s where his father had been a cop and an older cousin, too, both in the 1920s.

Sam’s father died at age thirty-nine, when Sam was sixteen. His mother’s sisters were at the apartment after the funeral. His mom said to one of them she wanted to go be with Arnie, she couldn’t live without him. Sammy sat in a dark corner, his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands until that moment. He raised his head up, and his mother caught his eye. “Oh, no, Sammy,” she said, “I didn’t mean it. I won’t ever leave you! Not for a long while, God willing.”

It was up to him then to find some way to bring in money to help. His mom sewed for people but had a problem with her legs and couldn’t sit very long. Sam made deliveries for shopkeepers all around the neighborhood. As time went by, he somehow didn’t get drafted, and he didn’t enlist. He wanted to be a cop, and that was it. Heroes and
protectors had to be among civilians, too, didn’t they?

But lately, every time Sam-the-Cop Rabinowitz went into Katz’s Deli on the corner of Houston and Ludlow, not only did he see the walls covered with pictures of movie and theater people, but he also saw a single sign that ripped at his conscience: S
END
A S
ALAMI
T
O
Y
OUR
B
OY
I
N
T
HE
A
RMY
. It kept buzzing his brain when he was on the street.

All along the wall behind the food counter hung salamis, long and short, fat and thin, hanging by the ends of their casings, even during the days of rationing. There’s always a way to get around restrictions, especially if you live in the right city. The aromas from steaming bins of pastrami and corned beef and hot dogs on the grill drew in people from the sidewalk who didn’t even know they were hungry until then. That November of 1944, Sammy purchased four salamis and brought them home and asked his mother to send them to the troops. “What,” she said, “I should know how to do this?”

The next afternoon while on his beat, he made up his mind. He saw Izzy Jacobs and Mike Kelley through a window of a soda shop, each devouring a charlotte russe. Mike always set aside the maraschino cherry for the last bite.

Sam went in, rattled up a chair, and rode it in reverse with his arms on the back. As if no time had elapsed since graduation, he said, “Hey, guys,” and looked at his watch. “At three o’clock, I’m going down to the induction center to enlist. Who’s coming with?”

Neither Izzy nor Mike had walls to paint or deliveries to make or machines to stitch leather for shoes. Jobs were hard to come by. Bosses got away with paying women less than the men they replaced, and women were feeling the glow of their own paychecks for a change. Sam’s call to enlist was an easy persuasion. The three set off to the recruitment center.

At Camp Gordon training camp, southwest of Augusta, Georgia, the young recruits found another from their neighborhood: Tino Caruso. His house was at Avenue D and Sixth. That gave him a direct shot into the East River Park if he wanted, where there was no noise from kids playing stoop ball and stickball in the streets and girls playing potsie on sidewalks. Sam liked recalling a day he’d wielded a broom handle to smack a high-bounce spaldeen missile with such muscle it took out a basement window across from Izzy’s place: instant home run. But the tinkling glass and the holler from inside had all the kids running down Avenue C, right in the middle, weaving around cars whose drivers laid on their horns. It was all fun, but once in a while he’d like a walk in the park … maybe with a girl.

The boys all made it through Military Police Corps combat training. Sam got stamped sergeant because of his city police experience, brief though it was. Izzy and Mike did okay, too. Tino Caruso was a bit of a dawdler, the last one over the obstacles, the last one to hand in written work. They requested codeployment and were surprised when they got it.

On the third day south of Bastogne, Sergeant Samuel Rabinowitz trudged through two-foot snow alongside Private Caruso. Manhattan winters saw snow, yes, but here Sam’s bones quivered from the cold and the constant explosions and shrieks of strafing and the grind of engines above, which was not Allied cover but German Stutkas concealed by a white lid of clouds. The enemy had fuel to fly while Allied aircraft sat dry-docked on tarmacs with near-empty tanks. It was later learned that the English-speaking Germans in stolen uniforms did more than misdirect traffic and cut communication lines. They raided critical supply lines: rail cars, trucks, warehouses.

That day when Sam and Tino slogged along a barely visible road, they saw a high rock face ahead where they could take a breather. Just before reaching it, there was a
crack
and something grazed the right side of Sam’s face. He swiped at his cheek with the back of his glove, then saw Caruso stumble but regain his feet and point to what Sam had already judged was a sniper’s nest in a tree thirty yards away. In a flat
two seconds, the shooter was meat on the ground. When Tino turned to say thanks, Sam understood that what had popped onto his cheek was the better part of Tino Caruso’s nose.

Caruso lived, of course. All the guys from the Lower East Side who codeployed lived. After the war’s end, they burrowed back to their neighborhoods. Sam stayed with his mother for the time being. She could use the help and he could save for the day, whatever that might be. He snagged a Seventh Precinct badge again, which didn’t happen for every former officer coming back from the war.

He was grateful but soon restless. He couldn’t help but think of a certain something: in the snowy woods of Belgium, he had ordered an enemy soldier wearing a hijacked American MP uniform to be shot for giving wrong directions and switching road signs to send soldiers off to nowhere. Not that Sam wanted to be making a decision like that today, but here, on wheeled or foot patrol, he spent his days slapping citations through drivers’ windows and writing up accident reports.

So much had changed. Conversations centered on labor disputes. Unionized longshoremen had picketed, forcing hundreds of jobs to go idle. Fifteen thousand city elevator operators refused to punch buttons to take people up to their apartments and offices. Then the tugboat crews struck. The Irish and Italians were fussing at each other more than ever, who knew over what. Many more Jews were moving on from pushcarts, succeeding in their small businesses and relocating their families to classier suburbs.