— And the mock-Homeric street-gang fights and the brawls, and the thousand, thousand sorrows and predicaments and situations. Mr. Maloney, man of 250 pounds or more, plodding heavily up the stairs. He was foreman of a street repair crew, and when the tenants downstairs raised too much of a row, he tapped the floor with a sledgehammer. And the poor Jew-girl — Cuckoo-Lulu, the Irish kids called her, lived on the ground floor back, flaunted a bedraggled rusty fox-fur on her neck in mid-July. Easy lay, easy flighty lay, even for you to muster up predatory courage to take advantage of, and you would; except that her father was already far gone with melanoma, his face a gruesome misshapen cinder block or lava boulder. And you would. Despite that. Except that Mom perceived your intentions — and for the first time, her face suffused, lectured you on the dreadful uncleanliness of women, and the dreadful diseases they could transmit to the unsuspecting male.
— Poor Mom, taking all the blame, as women had done since Eve. And you still would, despite that, entice — Cuckoo-Lulu. But her family suddenly moved away. So instead, you studied ways to augment your guile, improve deception beyond Mom’s detection.
“O Lulu had a baby.
She named him Sunny Jim.
She put him in a pisspot
To loin him how to swim.
He sank to the bottom
He floated to the top.
Lulu got excited
And grabbed him by the—
O what a lulu!
Lulu’s dead and gone.”
— What a delicacy, that song by half-grown micks. . Oh, where were you, Stigman? On every flight of scuffed-linoleum, brass-edged steps of the stairs you climbed were stories (pun), were tales (pun again), hundreds of them. There was even a local newspaper, a house sheet run by an elderly Irishman — the Harlem Home News—into which to delve for “copy,” if you had an iota of initiative, were willing to do an iota of research to exploit: whole volumes of prose awaited the turn of your hand.
No use, Ecclesias. You know full well where I was.
— Alas, yes.
It was a period then when of necessity Ira sought the company of the Jewish youth his age whose families had moved into the area, and those who still lived in the same block, like Davey Baer. Davey had graduated with Ira from P.S. 24 and gone to work as an office boy and wore a fashionable tight, white, removable stiff collar that pleated his scrawny neck into accordion folds. And Davey’s younger brother, Maxie, now also earning wages, looking much like his older brother, swarthy and slight — and one of the group. They, and other Jewish youth, more recent arrivals on the block, or in the immediate neighborhood, became, as it were by default, Ira’s provisional companions during that barren, that grievous period. Izzy (who became Irving) Winchel, with blanched blue eyes, a hooked nose, had aspirations of becoming a baseball pitcher. Utterly unscrupulous, the nearest thing to a pathological liar, and phony as a three-dollar bill; his arrant cribbings and copyings still hadn’t saved him from flunking out of Stuyvesant. He did peculiar things with words: mayonnaise became maysonay, trigonometry trigonomogy. Maxie Dain, short of stature, quick, alert, well-informed, best-spoken of any in the group (perhaps because his family had moved here from Ohio), ambitious, an office boy in an advertising firm, and Ira was sure a capable one. Maxie Dain’s father, blocky and affable, owned the new candy store, whose rear was depot for card games. Jakey Shapiro, short of stature and motherless; his short and cinnamon-mustached widowed father had moved here from Boston, married svelte Mrs. Glott, gold-toothed widow, mother of three married daughters, and janitress of 112 East 119th.
It was in her abode, in the janitorial quarters assigned her on the ground floor rear, that seemingly inoffensive Mrs. Shapiro set up a clandestine alcohol dispensary — not a speakeasy, but a bootleg joint, where the Irish and other shikkers of the vicinity could come and have their pint bottles filled up, at a price. And several times on weekends, when Ira was there, for he got along best with Jake, felt closest to him, because Jake was artistic, some beefy Irishman would come in, hand over his empty pint bottle for refilling, and after greenbacks were passed, and the transaction completed, receive as a goodwill offering a pony of spirits on the house.
And once again those wry (rye? Out vile pun!), wry memories of lost opportunities: Jake’s drab kitchen where the two sat talking about art, about Jake’s favorite painters, interrupted by a knock on the door, opened by Mr. Shapiro, and the customer entered. With the fewest possible words, perhaps no more than salutations, purpose understood, negotiations carried out like a mime show, or a ballet: ecstatic pas de deux with Mr. McNally and Mr. Shapiro — until suspended by Mr. Shapiro’s disappearance with an empty bottle, leaving Mr. McNally to solo in anticipation of a “Druidy drunk,” terminated by Mr. Shapiro’s reappearance with a full pint of booze. Another pas de deux of payment? Got it whole hog — Mr. Shapiro was arrested for bootlegging several times, paid several fines, but somehow, by bribery and cunning, managed to survive in the enterprise, until he had amassed enough wealth to buy a fine place in Bensonhurst by the time “Prohibition” was repealed. A Yiddisher kupf, no doubt.
Jake was stubbiest of everyone in the “crowd,” though not as slight as the stunted Baer brothers. He had a fine oval face, curly auburn hair, and a tip-tilted, oily nose. No one was as artistic nor as physically adept as he was. He could pick out tunes on the old player piano in the Shapiro living room. He was master of the tango, and even dropped Izzy Winchel’s homely sister on her head in her backward terpsichorian flings. A pool shark, the best of the bunch; so exceedingly proficient was he that at those times when he was between jobs, seeking an increased salary, he managed to support himself by betting on his skill at the pool table. Ira had sat in the Fifth Avenue poolroom, a flight up on the corner of 112th Street, and watched Jake play, his oily nose under the green lampshades gleaming. And of course, Jake was an artist. For years he had worked as an apprentice for a firm of commercial artists. For years, Ira heard about his friend’s work with an airbrush. Besides that, Jake had enrolled early in the National Academy of Design, and he often brought home samples of his work, admirable in their technical skill, Ira thought, charcoal drawings of plaster casts of classic sculpture — shapely nudes and bearded Greek deities.
The two often walked to the Metropolitan Museum together. Jake would admire the skill and craftsmanship of painters — as a professional; the way some of them rendered armor or other metals, or the composition of a painting. Rarely, or so it seemed to Ira, did the aesthetic quality, artistic depth, “meaning” of a painting ever make an impression on Jake — just once in a while, certain painters, like Robert Eakins, Winslow Homer. It was curious, and Ira more than once told himself so, that what Ira was looking at and admiring was more than the painting per se, was the things he might have encountered in his reading concerning the painter: Leonardo, del Sarto, Rafael, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens. And yet Jake did admire Rubens, did admire Rembrandt, called Ira’s attention to Frans Hals, to Vermeer. It was odd, an artist strangely deficient in intellect, so Ira would think later, then correct himself, try to seek a deeper reason: perhaps an artist deficient in awareness of even rudimentary ideas. Jake confessed that he often sat for long periods of time, sometimes for hours, when he had the leisure, sat for hours, conscious only afterward that not a single thought had entered his mind.