The Sea Beach Line (8 page)

“That's neither here nor there. You said you think Al is only missing, not dead?”

“Well, Goldov said Alojzy was missing and
believed
dead. And you said you
heard
he was. But I don't know anything for sure. Do you know any details?”

“No, I'm afraid I don't. He'd been away from the street for a week or so, which wasn't so strange, but then I heard about his death. Maybe it was from Goldov, actually, that I heard it first? I think it was, though I wouldn't swear to it.” This brought me back to the idea that the story of Alojzy's death had been purposefully crafted, by either Goldov or Alojzy. “Then everyone was talking about it. But that was all anyone seemed to know, that he was dead.

“Let me be clear,” Mendy said. “I'm only telling you what I know. I can't tell you for sure he's dead. I can only tell you that he disappeared from the street. But my opinion is, to be perfectly honest with you, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for him to come back. I'm sorry to say.”

“Excuse me!” A man in a jacket and tie jabbed a stack of books at us.

“No,” said Mendy. “Excuse me, I'm having a conversation here.”

“Sure, I just wanted to make a purchase, if you can imagine that.”

“Listen, I don't care what you want to do. I told you I'm having a conversation.”

“Are you serious? Is this the way to run a business?”

“No, I don't think this is any way to run a business. You're right about that, pal.” The man started to say something else, but couldn't think what and shook his head instead. He tossed the books onto the table and stomped off.

“My father,” I said. “What can you tell me for sure? You worked on this street together? What do you know about his life?”

“Your father. He sold down here, off and on, for years. Everybody down here knew him. He was, I don't know, he brought something out in people. Women especially. There were always women looking for him.” Mendy smiled. I imagined my father and this man exchanging little jokes about women's bodies, in a streetwise male language I'd never quite learned. “But he could talk to anyone. He would just as soon stay quiet, he wasn't one to run his mouth for no reason, but he was capable of talking to anyone. The gift of gab, I guess they call it. He spoke like six languages.”

“Six? English and Polish and Hebrew . . .”

“Some Arabic. Some Russian.”

“That's right.”

“A little Yiddish too, I found out. He had a girlfriend who was teaching him Spanish, for a while.” Mendy looked at his fingers. “Now we're up to seven. He had all that up on me. I got English, scraps of high school German, and some house Yiddish. That's about it, for me. It all adds up to just English, really. My parents never let me learn Yiddish proper, because they didn't want I should have an accent. Better I should speak like an American. They came from Poland too. But before the war. When there were Jews in Poland, still. Lots of them. I talked to Al about that, sometimes.”

“About . . .?” I had lost the thread of what Mendy was saying.

“About Poland, and the Jews who lived there. The history of it.”

“Oh. Okay. Is there anything else you can tell me about him, though? I mean, him personally?” I needed clues.

“Personally? He is—was—a rough person. But kind. He had
ziskeit
. You know the word? There's no other word for it. I know he did some things. I know he hurt Goldov. I know he hurt some girlfriends. I imagine he hurt others. Maybe he hurt you . . . if I might be so bold, as to interpret the look on your face. He was involved in I don't know all what. But I always thought of him as kind.

“I remember—I had a van for a while—I told Al he could borrow it one time, when he needed to move some books. He was shocked. He said, ‘Mendy, you're really trusting me with your van?' I said, ‘Al, is there a reason I shouldn't trust you?'”

“I see.” I remembered a van of his own that Al had owned when I was in high school. It was a white Astro van, and was always dirty and packed full of boxes. “Do you know . . . do you know where he'd been living?”

“I don't know if you could say he lived at any fixed place, exactly. But his, you could say, base of operations, where he kept his books, was a storage space down past SoHo. Where I do believe he slept sometimes, though he was very private about things like that. Very guarded.

“His space is in the same facility as mine, just down the hall. It's the only facility downtown with twenty-four-hour access. I guess that's another reason I think he died. It wouldn't be like him to just abandon his stuff, to not try to sell it off or something before he left.”

“So his stuff is still there? You don't think it's been cleaned out?”

“No. No one's been by to clean it out. I keep my eyes open.”

“They don't throw stuff out, when a person dies? Or disappears?”

“They throw stuff out—or sell it, if they can—when someone stops paying the bill. Not that it's my business, but I believe a man named Timur, who your father knew, took care of those details. He's a rich guy . . . kind of a benefactor. I guess it's paid up, because they haven't cut the lock yet.

“Matter of fact, I got the spare key to that lock in my own space there. Al had me hold on to a copy in a neighborly sort of way, in case of emergencies. If you come back with me in the evening, I can let you in.”

I spent the rest of the day with Mendy. He said I could meet him down on Varick Street in the evening, but I wanted to see how Alojzy spent many of his days. Maybe I would meet someone who knew something about his disappearance. I wanted to know how it felt to work out on the street all day long, and see what the street looked like from this side of the table.
The Yeshiva Bocher
was in my pocket, but I was more interested in the street life than in a book.

The book table was both part of and an oasis from the crowded sidewalk. Foot traffic passed by indifferently for the most part, but sometimes people detached themselves from the herd to come look at the books. Sometimes they browsed. Other times they looked for a specific title. Often, though, they seemed to be hungrily searching for something specific, but they didn't know what it was. I watched their faces as they picked books up and responded to them with curiosity, confusion, disappointment, and excitement.

I helped Mendy clean old price tags off newly acquired books. If they were left on, people would try to get the price on the tag, not the price Mendy had penciled in on the first page. He showed me how to clean the tags. First, you dissolved the glue by putting a drop of lighter fluid onto the tag, then you scraped the tag off with a razor blade. When that was done, you wiped off the tag residue, and any other grime, with a tissue and bit of rubbing alcohol. You had to be careful you didn't use too much alcohol, or you'd end up wiping off the ink from the cover picture. I did this a couple times with old paperbacks, but Mendy didn't seem to care too much.

“This,” he said, “is why I am not in the antique business.”

When Asher, the dreadlocked bookseller I'd spoken to earlier, saw me sticking around, he came by and introduced himself properly. I was also introduced to Hafid, a skinny Moroccan guy who set up next to Mendy and spent his day quietly reading Sufi books underneath a sun umbrella, and Robertson, a rare-book man who did his selling on the Internet, but hung around the block to talk shop and see if any interesting volumes surfaced. They nodded with respect when they
heard who my father was. I didn't press them all with questions, but I made sure they knew I was curious about Alojzy's life, whereabouts, and fate.

Around one o'clock, customers descended like a wave. The socializing stopped, and everyone went back to his own table to focus on making money.

“The lunchtime rush,” Mendy explained. I helped out by packing peoples' purchases into old Gristedes grocery bags while Mendy tallied the prices. He ran up and down the length of the table, connecting with each and every customer who was interested in making a purchase. After a customer left, I straightened out the books they'd disturbed. The people who didn't buy anything seemed to leave the biggest messes. I referred most questions to Mendy, but after a while I was able to point a few people in the right direction on my own.

After business slowed down, I bought a quart of macaroni salad and a Diet Coke from the deli and ate it in the park. When I returned, Mendy asked if I would cover the table while he used the restroom and got some food. He handed me a bankroll from his fanny pack of cash to make change with. It seemed strange that he trusted me with his cash, but then I remembered the story about my father and the van. If he could trust Alojzy, he could trust me.

I sold a couple books and wrote down the names so I could tell Mendy what they were. An NYU coed with sweet brown dates for eyes thumbed through an anthology of d.a. levy's work. She was looking at the collages, and asked me if I knew him and was he a good poet. I said he was, and told her about the love poem he wrote to the fifteen-year-old girl who turned him into the “subversive squad” of the Cleveland Police Department. The woman went away without buying the book.

Another wave came down on us at five o'clock, dropping off just at the end of dusk. It got colder as the sun went down, and Mendy put on a big green sweater he pulled from one of his many bags. The sky was hardening, closing in. Between the sky, the pavement, and the brick buildings along the square, I had the strange feeling that this wasn't the outside, just a giant room.

Mendy sat down beside me on the curb. “This is the dinnertime lull. There'll be one more chance to make some good money, starting around eight o'clock or so, then we'll pack it in.”

The whole world felt calmer than it had half an hour before. The people had gone off the street into homes and restaurants, or else down into the subway. The air was thicker and lazier. The cabs that had rushed by earlier were now on some other block. Mendy, for his part, was no longer running up and down the length of the table, and had taken out a yogurt container and a metal spoon.

“So what do you do with yourself, Izzy?” he asked between slurps. “You in college or something?”

“No. I was there for a while. It didn't really work out.”

“Sure. College wasn't for me either. I felt—this was in the '60s, early '60s, maybe things are different now—they didn't have anything I wanted. I always think of that scene in
Casablanca
. The guy says, What brings you to Casablanca? And the other guy, the Humphrey Bogart character, Rick, I think, says, I came for the waters. But, Rick, the guy says, there's no waters. Oh, he says, I was misinformed. That's how I felt about the university.”

“I'm not sure I follow.”

“I was misinformed.”

“Ah. Yeah. I get you. Before the semester, they give you a little magazine, informing you about the classes, and they were straight with me. I chose the classes I wanted, and I read a lot of books, even if I didn't write all the papers. I maybe read too many books. But yeah, it wasn't where I was supposed to be.” I kicked an empty coffee cup away from my foot. “I had to leave, because they threw me out. But it was time for me to go anyway. I'd gotten all I could from a place like that. When they told me to leave, I said, ‘fine.'” Thinking back on it now, I should have left as soon as I read the
Pardes
story. That was all they had to give me.

“Was it brawling?” Mendy asked. “You get into some fistfights?”

“No, nothing like that. It was drugs, actually. I hooked some kids up with some acid and when one of them got in trouble he turned me
in.” I was a little surprised to find myself being so open about all this, but Mendy had been honest with me about Al, and I felt I should be honest with him in return.

“Life's rough like that,” Mendy said. “You try to be a nice guy, and help another guy out. And then that's what you get in return.”

“That's what you get, all right.”

“Still, you're lucky you're a free man. A friend of mine got in some trouble like that once . . . they gave him ten years for two sheets of blotter acid. This was back in the '70s. It was the '80s by the time they let him out.” Mendy was quiet for a minute. “He was real different then.”