Moloch: Or, This Gentile World (22 page)

They were passing a United Cigar store. Dave dragged Moloch inside, grabbed a handful of Optimos, and pushed them in Moloch’s fist.

“What the hell, Dave, I won’t smoke all these tonight!”

“I should worry! Stick ‘em in your pocket. You never know when we might need ‘em.”

Moloch pretended to be overwhelmed by this show of generosity. He expected Dave to do the honors.

“Here, smoke one yourself,” he said, trying to shove one in Dave’s trap.

“Nuthin’ doin’,” said Dave. “Luckies for me … look at me teeth.”

He displayed an irregular row of stained fangs.

“Fierce!” Moloch commented and looked away.

They were walking through City Hall Park. The benches were full of bums parking their fannies after a day of sloth and despair. Some of them were sprawled comfortably on the very steps
of the City Hall, a thin layer of newspaper protecting their weak backs. A spanking breeze had set in from the ocean. It wafted a delicious smell of clams and mud.

Moloch poked his nose up and inhaled a strong dose of ozone.

“I could go a shore dinner tonight,” he remarked.

“Geez, you must have a tapeworm,” said Dave.

“No, I got a feeling of ro-mance,” he answered. “Nothing would suit me better now, Dave, than to sit out on the end of a pier with a stein in my hand and some music playin’ oft’ in the distance, and a lot of little Japanese lanterns swaying up above. …”

“What brought this on, the beer? You forgot sumpin’ in that cute little picture, didn’tja?”

“What?”

“You ain’t fergettin’ the molls, are yuh?”

Dave scratched his head, pushed his hat comically over one eye, and put on the expression of a man trying to solve a crossword puzzle.

At the Brooklyn Bridge Dave insisted on boarding a car. It was an open car. They sat up front with the motorman.

Dave held his hat under his arm. “This breeze is great, ain’t it?” he said as they got to the top of the bridge.

Moloch was busy peering down through the steel latticework at the swift-running tide below, eddying and swirling in great inky blotches. A tiny tug was dragging a string of towboats up the river.

“There’s only one Noo York, ain’t there, D. M.?”

Dave asked this this with his eyes strained toward the Battery. Moloch wondered what kind of impression this awesome panorama inspired in Dave. He looked at him intently. Dave’s fat little rubber neck was still craned toward the towering peaks poking their soft nozzles through the smoke and haze of the peaceful canyons downtown.

“Didja ever think of taking a Brodie from the Brooklyn Bridge?” asked Moloch.

“Yeah,
I
dont think!
Did you?”

“Oh, sometimes.” He let out a delicious yawn, and slouching down in his seat, nonchalantly stuck his gunboats up on the front of the car, which got the motorman’s goat.

On the other side they jumped off and walked to Borough Hall, where they caught a crosstown car.

“What street do we get off at?”

“She said India Street.”

“Where’s that?”

“I dunno. Somewheres near the end of the line, she said.”

“Some ride.”

“Ain’t it? Tell me, D. M., where in hell can you get as big a ride for yer money as Noo York?”

“How do you know?” growled Moloch. “You’ve never been anywhere else, have you?”

“That’s right, too. Well you oughta know … you’ve been around a lot.”

“Take it from me, Dave, this is the lousiest place in the world. You don’t realize it until you get away from it.”

This observation brought on a heavy silence. Dave looked as if he were sizing up the world through a kinetoscope. Suddenly he turned to Moloch and assumed a confidential air.

“I wanta ask yer somethin’, D. M.,” he said seriously. “I’d like to know what I could read to … to improve my mind.”

Moloch was flabbergasted. Dave might as well have asked him to hand over the seven sacred seals. He intimated that Dave was trying to spoil a pleasant evening.

“No, I’m serious,” Dave continued. “You see, I’d like to improve my education. I started to work when I was twelve.”

Moloch glanced at him skeptically. “Hm!” he said. “I’ve got to ask
you
a question, Dave.... What would you do with an education, anyway?”

“Aw, be serious, will yer?”

“I am,” said Moloch. “Don’t you know that an education is unnecessary—if you want to get ahead in the world? That’s what you want it for, don’t you?”

“Sure, what else could I do with it?”

“Precisely. Now look at old man Houghton, and that jackass on the thirteenth floor. Did they have an education?”

“They musta had somethin’ else,” Dave admitted reluctantly. He brightened up suddenly. “Anyways, D. M., I’ve come to the conclusion that if you wanta succeed in life either you must be educated or you must be a good crook....” He was going to continue but Moloch choked him off.

“Now you’re talkin” horse sense, Dave.” He slapped him heartily on the back. “Dave, I’m gonna tell you somethin’: we’re too god-damned honest for this world, do you know that? We’re never gonna be rich as long as we lead this Sunday-school life. Look at Morgan, Rockefeller, Astor, Vanderbilt, Gould.... How do you suppose they got rich? Savin’ it up?”

Dave looked considerably cheered by this piece of information.

“Gee, I’m glad to hear you talk like that,” he said. “I thought maybe you thought I wuz talkin’ through muh hat.”

In a little while Dave opened up again. This time it was to explain to Moloch how tough it was to be born a Jew.

“Forget it!” said Moloch. “You’re gettin’ along, aincher?”

“Yeah, but…”

“I don’t want to hear any buts. Think of something pleasant. .. . You never told me how you landed these tarts we’re gonna see. Where did you pick ‘em up?”

“Didn’t I tell yuh? Gee, that’s funny.” He thought a minute.... “It wuz a cinch. You shoulda been with me. I hopped into Child’s one day last week fer a bite; I no sooner gets inside than I pikes a gal I knew onct.. . someone I met a long time ago at the Roseland. She wuz workin’ as a waitress. I goes right up to her. ‘Hello,’ I says, ‘how did
you
get here?’ ‘Well, well,’ she says, ‘where you been all this time?’ I told her I worked around here. It didn’t take me three minutes to date her up. And then I thought of you. … I asts her: ‘C’n yer git a friend?’ ‘Why not?’ she says, and that’s all there was to it.”

“That sounds great.”

“Don’t it? There’s no trouble if you work it right.”

“You said it.”

The car was rumbling over the bridge at Wallabout Creek. The sullen stream was streaked with floating islands of grease,

and a stench as of sixty-nine dead horses filled their nostrils. Dave held his nose with two fingers until they got out of the zone.

“Reminds me of old times,” Moloch reflected aloud.

Dave perked up and smiled.

“I wuz born around here m’self,” he confessed.

”
What
?
Do you mean it?” Moloch grasped Dave’s hand and wrung it heartily. “Pull out that flask,” he commanded. “We’ve got to have a drink on that, Dave.”

“What,
here?"

“Sure, you’re not gonna wait till we get to Greenpoint, are you?”

“Yeah, but …”

Moloch reached into Dave’s back pocket and extracted the flask. “Who’s gonna stop us, heh?” As he held the upturned flask to his lips a soft gurgling sound escaped. Dave watched him, fascinated.

“Now tell us, where did you hail from—the North Side?”

“No, the South Side—Lee Avenue.”

“That so? I was raised on the North Side…. Do you remember Pat McCarren?”

“Do I? Ask me another.”

“Remember the battles we had when the two gangs fought it out in the lots?”

Dave grinned all over. “Look at this.” He held his finger to a deep scar over his right eye. “Got that with a can one day.”

“Great! Great!” roared Moloch. “So you’re from the old neighborhood, too. Well, well.”

They put their arms about each other’s shoulders and sank lower into their seats. Neither said a word for some time. They just sat contentedly, gazing out on scenes of bygone days. The car took a sharp swing at Broadway Ferry.

“Those were the happy days,” sighed Moloch. “That was when New York was a gay, spanking dog of a town, eh Dave?”

Dave shook his head. “Do you remember the Haymarket?”

“Which one—Brooklyn or New York? Aw, the hell with that. Do you remember the Girl in Blue?”

“You mean Millie de Leon … at the Bum? Say, I’d give ten bucks to see her again. Remember how the sailors used to run up the aisle to grab one of her garters … do you remember that?”

“Don’t make me laugh. And Pat McCarren parading up and down like an undertaker from Larry Carroll’s saloon to the Bum and back again, with a mug on him like a Jesuit By the way, did you go to Houston Street last week?”

Here the conversation became rather technical. The burlesque season had just opened and there was quite a long-drawn-out controversy between the two as to the merits of the stock company which flourished at the National Winter Garden.

Finally Dave relapsed into a moody silence. Moloch puffed away contentedly on his cigar. When he looked at Dave again he thought the latter was becoming glum.

Dave explained that he was “thinkin’.”

“I can’t figure out, D. M., why a fella like you goes to a burlesque show anyhow.”

Moloch received this in silence.

“It ain’t that you look like a priest… it’s the books you read. The two don’t go together, do you understand me?”

“I sure do. You mean my mind’s too good?”

“Sumpin’ like that. … I wuz lookin’ at that paper-covered book you had with you last week. I couldn’t read a page of it without a dictionary by my side, and then I don’t think I’d make it out. Geez, it wuz dry. I thought it wuz a book on science, or somethin’ like that.”

“Oh, you mean
Ulysses
”
said Moloch.

“That’s it. I couldn’t pronounce the name. What does a guy write a book like that for that nobody can understand—except a few educated people?”

Moloch agreed that this was one of the mysteries of the universe. “But there was a lot of dirt in it, Dave. I think you missed something that time.”

“Is zat so? Then why the hell does he put all those jawbreakers in it for?”

“To keep it out of the hands of children, I guess.... Say, watch out, we must be near India Street now. This looks like Greenpoint.”

Moloch started to say something about Boccaccio and Rabelais. Dave only had time to gather that they too contained a rich mixture of filth and obscenity when he saw a sign reading India Street. He tugged Moloch’s sleeve. They hopped off and looked about them. It looked like the fringe of the pale in a Polish city.

“What’s that?” Dave exclaimed, pointing to a mast going by the end of the street.

“Why, that’s the river, Dave. Great, eh?”

“I’ll say so. All yer gotta do here is stick yer head outa the winder and yer c’n see tugboats goin’ by fer breakfast. Not such a terrible dump after all. Yer c’n get some fresh air, b’Jesus!”

Dave got out his address book and began to check up on the house numbers. “We’re right,” he said, tugging Moloch along. “Don’t forgit, on our way home tell me about them books. I wanta read ‘em.”

“Fine. Don’t forget to ask me.”

There were more “don’t forgets.” Dave suddenly remembered that his name should be Brown for the occasion. “Don’t forget:
Dave Brown
.”

“All right,
Brown
.
Call me Morgan … Danny Morgan.”

Dave commenced to cackle again.

“What’s the matter?” asked Moloch. “Morgan’s a good Irish name, ain’t it?”

“Yeah, but you ain’t Irish.”

“The hell I ain’t. Who’s gonna prove it?”