“And Al was a good-looking guy,” he went on. “Could’ve been a movie star, except, as I said, he never opened his mouth. But he saw more pussy than a pair of ladies’ panties. Which is why I never understood why he was shacking up with this girl Vera, who made her living as a whore.”
“Al Newberger lived with a whore?” I said.
Sidney lunged across the table and backhanded me on the left breast. “What the hell do you know? Of course he was living with a whore!”
“What do you mean, of course? You just said you never understood it yourself.”
“That’s what I’m saying!” Sidney said. “He lived with her!”
It’s tempting to say that Sidney ’s exasperating conversational logic had been brought on by old age, but, sadly, it appears to have been a permanent fixture of his temperament.
“He lived with a girl who made her living shtupping other men,” Sidney said, shaking his head at the peculiarity of it.
“Maybe he was afraid of commitment,” I suggested.
Sidney looked at me as if I were out of my mind. Psychological speculation was not a hobby of his, while I, who was already in therapy-no doubt partly because of growing up around infuriating Jewish men-loved nothing more than speculating about the complexities of human relationships.
“I’ll tell you what he was afraid of Ronnie. He was afraid of not getting a first-class blow job, that’s what he was afraid of. If you want a job done well, get a professional-that’s what I’ve always said. I hope you don’t mind my plain speech.”
“I can take it,” I said. I not only loved his salty language-I loved hearing about these Jews who didn’t talk so much, who beat the shit out of their opponents, who lived with whores.
“Still,” Sidney said, “what kind of man wants to sleep with a lady you don’t know where her pussy’s been? What am I gonna do? He’s my best ballplayer. What’s the worst could’ve happened? The clap. Al even brings her around the National Hotel-you remember, don’t you, that we played our home games in a hotel ballroom?-and all the guys know her, and she’s a classy kind of whore, always with the tailored suits and a nice hat.”
It was dawning on me that Sidney was working up to something. Although I had no idea where the story was going, he didn’t seem merely to be trolling the past for glimmering little glories, as old men do, as Sidney had started to do the last few years. This story was already longer than most of them.
“So we’re leading the league by a game or two over the Bronx Black Stars, and it’s March, maybe two or three weeks to go before the playoffs. Now, we’ve won the championship two out of the last three seasons, five of the last seven, so everyone’s gunning for us. You should’ve heard the crowds at our road games, Ronnie: ‘We’ll get you, you bunch of kikes’ and ‘You fuckin’ sheenies!’ But we loved it. ‘We may be sheenies,’ I’d yell back, ‘but we’re the sheenies who are kicking your ass!’ I’ve got to tell you, Ronnie, it was a great time to be a Jew who could put a ball in the hoop. A great time. You should’ve been there.”
Like many American Jewish boys who had known only the suburbs growing up, who had never served in the military, I had gone through life feeling untested, but not especially eager to pass any of the tests I had in mind. Our energies had been rerouted, like traffic around a bad accident, to the world of intellectual pursuit. Through Sidney and his stories, I vicariously enjoyed the tough ethnic brothers I admired from afar. Not the thugs like Mendy Weiss, Arnold Rothstein, Bugsy Siegel, or Gurrah Shapiro. The good Jews, like Sidney.
Sidney yanked a hanky out of his pants pocket and mopped his brow, then ran the soiled cloth over his balding head, as if he were polishing it. “So what happens? What happens is Al Newberger’s home one night in the apartment he shared with Vera when he hears a car pull up outside and there’s an argument going on in there between Vera and one of her Johns. Apparently, the guy couldn’t perform and he’s saying he shouldn’t have to pay, and she’s telling him there’re no free samples and that she won’t get out of the car till he forks over the two bucks. And Al’s watching from the window and sees this guy get out, come around, and pull Vera out of the car and throw her on the ground and give her a kick for good measure.
“Well, Al’s out of the apartment building in no time flat-you gotta understand how quick he was, Ronnie-and Al picks up Vera, makes sure she’s all right, and sends her into the apartment. Then he and the guy have a few words. Before the other guy knows it, Al Newberger is kicking the crap out of him. By the time Al’s through with him, the guy’s face looks like a tsimmes. So Al throws him in the back of the guy’s car and then drives the car to the old railroad yard and leaves him there and walks back home, fuming.
“I forgot to tell you one thing, Ronnie. While Al was beating this john up, a gun, a five-shot revolver of some kind, falls out of the guy’s camel-hair coat, and now Al’s got it. He doesn’t know what to do with it, but he sure as hell isn’t going to leave it in the back of the car with the guy, so he goes home, wraps it up in some rags, and hides it up on a ledge inside the fireplace chimney.”
“How do you know all this?” I ask.
“Because Al told me later. I got it out of him later. Get me a glass of water, Ronnie, no ice. I’m not used to doing this much talking.”
He waited until I returned from the kitchen sink to resume the story. He took occasional, incongruously dainty sips of water. “So a couple of days later, after our next home game, Al’s walking home from the National when a guy falls in step with him. Spiffy-looking gentleman in his late thirties wearing a nice chalk-striped, double-breasted suit and rimless glasses. He looks like a well-dressed accountant, which, I happen to know, is what his mother once hoped he would be. But his father, who used to launder restaurant linen for the mob, seemed to get the upper hand with Irving. That’s this guy’s name, Irving Levchuck, but he introduces himself to Al as just Irving, and when Al tells him to get lost, Irving says very calmly that Al beat up an associate of his the other day, a guy named Itchy Weintraub. That’s the name of the guy Al left bleeding in the Packard in the railroad yard.”
“Is everybody a Jew in this story?” I asked.
“Yes. Absolutely. So Irving says to Al as they’re walking along that he’s in a position to propose a resolution to their squabble that will leave Al Newberger physically unharmed. So Al says, ‘I’m supposed to worry about some guy named Itchy hurting me?’ So Irving says, “Look, Al, you shoot basketballs for a living, and you’re pretty good at it. Well, Itchy Weintraub shoots people for a living, and he’s got an even higher shooting percentage than you.’
“Now Irving Levchuck has Al Newberger’s attention. Irving tells Al that this guy Itchy’s a schlammer who used to work for the Matteo brothers, who used to control South Philadelphia when the Italians were in charge. So if you were a little schmeggege like Itchy and you liked to shoot people, and you wanted to get paid for it, you worked for the dagos.”
“So why’s this guy Irving involved?”
“Do I interrupt you when you’re in the middle of a story?”
“Yes.”
“So here’s what Irving says to Al. He says if you’re good enough to make a basket, which you are, then you’re good enough to miss. Al knows just where this is going, of course, and tells Irving to take a hike. Why shouldn’t he? After all, Al Newberger’s a hero in Philly. He’s the biggest thing going. There’s only one professional basketball team in Philly and that’s us. For Jews, he’s like Michael Jordan. Whole families would come to the National on Saturday night to watch us play. After, there was a dance, with Ted Morris conducting his orchestra. Ted was one of our starting guards, fast as hell, but he had a band and they’d start up right after the game. Ted didn’t even have time to shower. He’d get out of his uniform and right into his tux. Ten minutes after the game’s over and the ballroom’s a sea of dancing Jewish couples. You never saw anything like it. This was before television, Ronnie-”