XII
Kids who owned the new steering-sleds, as the latest models were called, sleds with iron runners, scooted down the snowy slope on the west side of Mt. Morris Park. How few were the times of joyous abandon: when the kids who owned steering-sleds allowed you to fling yourself on top of them as they belly-whopped down the slope in full career. Uncle Max built his impoverished nephew a sled out of a wooden box and scrap-wood runners — and stood to one side, sheepish and noncommittal at the ridicule that greeted his nephew when he joined the others with his crude homemade sled. With their steel runners, they could even belly-whop down the snow-covered stone stairs of the Mt. Morris Park hill. Ira’s flimsy sled came apart after a few tries on just a gentle incline. Yes, spraddled out into a silly apple-box with the label still on it, and pieces of board with nails sticking out of the erstwhile runners, a sorry cripple, a caricature of a sled, abandoned in the snow. .
And with Harry, the ordeal of his elementary schooling over, the two tried hawking Yiddish newspapers after school, crying the headlines through the darkening streets of Jewish Harlem, but with little success. They had no great “Wuxtra” to peddle like the great extra in August a few months ago, and passersby knew it. . So their cry was in vain, and most of their papers went unsold, and in a day or two they gave up the venture.
But for over seventy years there would remain in Ira’s mind the projection of a kid in knee-pants and long black stockings hustling, panicky and shrill through a Harlem street into the twilight of the past. .
And ever and again in idleness, he would experience a harking back to a time — or forward to a time — not haphazard as the present had become, but seamless again, as it once had been; a harking back, an inarticulate yearning that somewhere, somehow, the scattered pieces of his random world would coalesce into unity once more. Else, why did he stand here on this street corner, in his solitary rambling, familiar street corner in bustling Jewish Harlem, suddenly transfigured, full of aureate promise, a redemption beyond the big dope he was, the “big ham,” the kids on the block called him, beyond Pop’s exasperated cry in Yiddish: “Lemekh! What a lame Turk you’ve turned out to be!”
— Oh, yes, you did have little jobs, didn’t you? You tried to earn something.
Before school. He got up early in the morning, in the slum-bleary winter morning, and delivered fresh rolls and butter or cream cheese to homes on 119th Street, between Park and Madison, where the houses were a little better — and more Jewish. Yes, the grocer in the same block hired him. Shadowy, the kid running up and down stairs with fresh bulkies. Though Pop was always pleased when Ira earned a dollar or two, and his attitude during the time of his son’s earning would change — he would become friendly; he would tease Mom that Ira’s earnings should be deducted from her allowance. “Gey mir in der erd!” she would flush, and cry out, “Gey mir in der erd!”—it was Mom who objected to her son’s before-school delivery route, his early-morning exploitation, poor child. “I don’t need the few shmoolyaris,” she said, calling the despised dollar a shmoolyareh, as was her wont. And he worked after school in a small, frowsy storefront shop where the owner and his wife, who lived in the rear, made fancy buttons; and Ira was taught how to make fancy buttons too: by spreading a patch of cloth on top of the bare metal button, and with a lever-operated press, force the cloth to unite with the metal. Working, as was his wont, lackadaisically, he caught his thumb between punch and button, and howled with pain.
He was sent on errands: once to deliver buttons to a tailor shop on east “A hundert und taiteent stritt.” Of course, Ira duly went to east a hundred and eighteenth street, found no tailor shop there, and reported back, with the buttons undelivered.
“I said a hundert und taiteent stritt,” the boss repeated in a dudgeon.
“I went there!” Ira clamored: “A hundred and eighteenth street.”
“No! Oy, gevald! Vot’s wrunk vit you? Taiteen, taiteen, not eighteen!”
And: at age eleven (How brief the age of innocence: The troll is on the bridge, Billygoat Gruff.). At age eleven, he worked in Biolov’s drugstore. Every day after school, and Saturdays all day. Doing all kinds of things, from chores to running errands: mopping the tiled floor, polishing the showcases — with a sheet of newspaper. “A little more elbow grease,” said the short, bald, affable Mr. Biolov. Elbow grease. It was the first time Ira had heard the expression, and for a moment he thought such a substance really existed. Delivering prescriptions, running errands. And all this for $2.50 per week. And when he lost, or his pocket was picked of a five-dollar bill Mr. Biolov had given him with which to buy drugs at the wholesale drug depot on Third Avenue, Ira had to work two weeks to make up for the loss. Mortars and pestles, yes, yes, in which drugs were ground, mixed in the back room of the drugstore. Syrup simple was sugar-water, wasn’t it? Sarsaparilla went with castor oil. Mr. Biolov was a “shtickel duckter,” Mom said, meaning he was a “bit of a doctor.” He gave first aid to accident victims who were brought into the drugstore, until the ambulance arrived. He took cinders out of eyes; he knew when to prescribe Seidlitz Powder and when to prescribe the dried berries that Mom brewed into a tea and were so pleasantly laxative; and when to prescribe citrate of magnesia — which was kept on ice, was cold and bubbly and lemony, and sent you to the toilet just as fast almost as castor oil. Sarsaparilla. Spirits of ammonia. Oil of peppermint. There were jars and jars of every sort of compound on the shelves, not ordinary jars, but all uniform in shape, made of pretty enamel, with wide mouths and glass stoppers.
In the back of the drugstore were special boards with long grooves in them which Mr. Biolov filled with the paste he made by grinding drugs together, and then cut the long worms of paste into pills, rolling them afterward in powdered sugar. In each corner of the store window stood two glorious glass amphorae, each one full of liquid, one brilliant green in color, the other brilliant ruby. Between them, in the middle of the show window, a fake monkey performed his tedious, tireless trick of pouring the same fluid from one glass to another. And once, made curious by Mr. Biolov’s secretive manner, Ira peeked into the little package he was given to deliver: a peculiar shallow rubber cup around a ring: puzzling; it wasn’t a condom; he had already seen those; he knew about them: scumbags they were called in the street. He too retrieved a package of them that were thrown into the waste basket, and tried blowing them up, but the rubber had deteriorated, and they popped. Best of all, he liked fetching people to the telephone booth in the store; they almost always gave him a nickel tip for the service; and more than once, when he called an Irish girl to the phone, a pretty Irish girl, with pink cheeks and eyes glistening, hurrying down the stairs after him through a cabbagey-permeated tenement, the deeply-breathing, far-away-looking girl gave him a dime. He could guess why, though he couldn’t understand why. Rankling over Mr. Biolov’s callousness in making him work two weeks for nothing, Ira worked a few weeks longer, and then quit.
And now it was summer again; random, rambling summer. There were certain trees on Madison Avenue that grew between the sidewalk and Mt. Morris Park, which shed a small green seedpod that came twirling down. “Polly-noses,” the kids named them; they could be split and were sticky and stuck to the bridge of one’s nose. It was on a summer night that Ira licked the only kid he ever licked in Harlem, Jewish Morty Nussbaum who lived on the top floor of 108 East. Morty had wanted to show Ira how to “pull off”—when the two were sitting in warm weather up on the roof, and both had gotten their peckers out. And then suddenly Ira refused to go on. Memory seemed to scramble into separate ugly clots: of a lanky individual in a pork-pie hat and rusty-neat clothes, of what he wanted to do to Ira, and of what he did afterward against a tree trunk. Despite Morty’s urgings that it was good, Ira balked; instead he rebuttoned his fly. How could anything be good that was as loathsome as that? Later, over some trifling dispute, he beat Morty in a fistfight, beat him easily. And even as Ira knew he was winning, he was conscious at the same time of the Irish kids egging the two on, two Jewish kids. And though exultant at winning, when Morty all at once admitted defeat, Ira disregarded the Irish kids’ injunction that he pound Morty on the back while yelling in traditional boast of triumph: two, four, six, eight, nine, I can beat you any old time. Soon after, Morty and his family moved away.