Life and Death of a Tough Guy (11 page)

“Joey — ”

“Why I keep seein’ you I dunno.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Damn right! You’re just a freak inna circus. Like all them Jews! God damn jewgirls! ‘Don’t kiss me,’ ” he mimicked hatefully.

She slapped him. He caught her wrist, released it almost instantly. “Aw what’re we fightin’ for. The hell with it!”

They were both silent and then she said. “You’re Jewish yourself — ”

“Yeh, yeh, don’t remind me.”

“Joey, what’s wrong — ”

“G’night,” he muttered and walked off. He felt dead beat, as if another hand twice as heavy, a hundred times as heavy as Sadie’s — a hand big as a tenement on an arm as long as the street — had hit him.

“Joey,”she called to him softly.

He ignored her, walking down sidewalks where hate and fear and lust could run like mad dogs, but not pity. Never pity.

He would’ve given odds he was finished with Sadie Madofsky. What a guy wanted from a dame was one thing. One thing only. That had been his code, straight out of the gutter and clinched to a fare-thee-well in coal cellar and backyard shed. But as he sat with Georgie in some night owl of a coffee pot, among the stags of the city, clerks out of furnished rooms and taxi drivers, stray college kids with empty gin flasks having themselves a snack and a yawning look at the headlines, he would see Sadie’s reddish-brown eyes, twice as large as life and yet ghostly as his cigarette smoke. Sadie Madofsky, and what did she have? Nothing. A dumb redhead who when she finished high school’d get herself a secretary job and one of these days marry some jewboy. He was touched in the head chasing after her. The hell with her! He was through. And he would stir his coffee and wonder if he’d gone after her so long only because she was Jewish.

All winter long Joey felt a stirring in his mind: a springtime of questionings and speculations. Some thoughts he could see the sense of; others were just a swift pain and he wished he didn’t have them. The last snow flurries of March blew in like January, to melt under noontime suns that belonged in May, and Joey was certain that at last he was growing up. Once, all he’d wanted was to be tough. Lucky the Spotter’d put him wise. The Spotter was right, the Spotter was always right — the guy who was both tough and smart was one jump ahead of the toughest guy in the world. The catch was that there were all kinds of smart. A guy like the Spotter was tops because the Spotter knew how to make things work like clockwork. The Spotter pressed all the buttons, one bunch of guys protecting his speaks and another bunch bringing the booze in. With Tom Quinn fixing the politicians, and Farber, the lawyer, fixing the law. He was one lucky guy to have the Spotter behind him.

• • •

When Joey and Georgie stepped into the clubroom that spring night, Mike, who was playing barkeep, yelled. “Hey, Joey, how about a bock beer?”

“What about me!” Georgie asked, but Mike didn’t see him, none of the guys clustered like swilling flies around the beer keg could see Georgie. Georgie was now hitting six feet and wearing a brand-new spring suit, his black hair parted in the middle like Rudolph Valentino’s. But they couldn’t see Georgie because all their eyes were on the guy the Spotter’d given the nod to, the guy who’d stood up to the Bug. True, the Bug went around whispering about jewboys. And so what!

Jewboy? …
To Mike, Joey was more a comer than a jewboy. Jewboy? Maybe to Bughead Moore, but not to Mike O’Reilley who wore a holy medal around his neck, or to Harry Halsey the best driver of a stolen car you could find, or to Ted Griffin the ex-pug who only had to show his face in a speak where they were fooling around with somebody’s else’s booze for the fooler-arounders to get white in the gills, or to Sarge Killigan trusted by all the guys, or to Cockeye Smith trusted by nobody, who carried his knockout punch in his pocket, a roll made up of two bucks in nickels. To all of them, beer drinkers and beer hustlers, Joey was a comer.

Jewboy, wop, or mick, a comer was a comer, with a nationality all his own, with an old man out of the land of good breaks, and an old lady from the special little church around the corner of all their dreams — where the stained glass was green as the green on a century note.

Joey drank the heady bock, the eyes of the gang intoxicating as another beer. They wanted to get next to him, he thought, the dark brown beer swelling his gut and his head.

Round after round they drank, gabbing of women, clothes, cars, of Babe Ruth coming up for another season, and Jack Dempsey the Manassa Mauler. Cockeye Smith asked everybody if they’d read what the
News
said about Al Capone having seven hundred strong-arms on his payroll. “That guy!” Cockeye declared with a true religious fervor in his voice. “He’s got the mayor of Cicero on his payroll!”

Sarge Killigan blew a smoke ring into the blue cloud hanging over their heads. “Al Capone’s done pretty good for a wop,” the ex-doughboy said with a sly blue humorous twinkle in his eye.

“Done pretty good for anybody!” Cockeye shouted.

“If Torrio hadn’t brought him out to Chicago,” Sarge Killigan baited Cockeye, “where’d the wop be? Still down the East Side and lucky to have a pot to piss in.”

“And a window to throw it out,” Joey chimed in, laughing.

“You guys wisht you were half as good as Al Capone out there in Chicago,” Cockeye said spitefully.

Joey recited:

It was a bit of Hell’s Kitchen doggerel they all knew.

“Balls McCarty, Balls McCarty!” Cockeye said to Joey while Mike yelled for all of them to pipe down, waving his arms over his head. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and the tattooed mermaid on his left forearm swam and glided through the thick bluish smoke. Georgie, silent as a clam, now announced that he and Joey’d been to Chicago. All their eyes shifted to the man Who Had Been There, and Georgie, with an audience dropped into his lap, kept on talking. “New York’s better for my dough!” the eye-witness wanted them all to know.

“Which is better?” Cockeye asked Joey. Georgie, his audience lost, gulped down his beer while Joey answered slowly as if he’d spent a solid year thinking it over.

“I’ll take New York.”

New York or Chicago
. It jiggled inside Joey’s head when with a belly full of the Spotter’s dark brown bock he and Georgie and Cockeye and Mike climbed up the stairs of Mother Mary’s place on Forty-Ninth. New
York or Chicago
, the stairs creaked and Joey remembered how he and Georgie’d blown into Chicago with not a buck between them. Two hoboes, fleas on the jump. Had Al Capone ever been that broke? Cockeye goosed Mike who giggled, the giggle coming out New
York or Chicago
, and when the door at the end of the landing opened, it too squeaked out New
York or Chicago
.

The four of them entered Mother Mary’s sitting room, and in that whorehouse parlor with the furniture fat and stuffed and green, Mother Mary gave them all a smile made of genuine tin. She was a small fat woman in an expensive dress, her hair snow white, and a face underneath that would’ve gone better if it had been green like the sofa pillows. A face, fat and thin at the same time, fat-cheeked from the rich foods she liked, and thin from the bodies of the girls she’d consumed in her career. “New York or Chicago?” Joey asked her the riddle, laughing, while his beery pals roared and advised Mother Mary she shouldn’t mind Joey, the best guy there ever was, and she should fix him with the best because he only deserved the best.

“If he don’t stop yelling he deserves to get kicked down the stairs,” the Madame replied in the scolding voice of a school marm.

“I’ll take you,” Joey said. He circled her corseted waist and whirled her around.

“Leggo!” she screeched. “No tough guys here! You’ll get out you don’t behave!”

He released her, thumbing his nose at his pals who were trying to quiet him, sing songing, “New York or Chicago, New York or Chicago.”

“He’s the Mayor of Chicago,” Cockeye said, egging Joey on. “Ain’t you Joey? Tell Mother Mary who you are!”

“I don’t give a damn if he’s Al Capone!” Mother Mary retorted. “If he don’t behave — ”

“Al Capone, this me,” Joey laughed at her.

“Lissen, Al Capone, you wanta girl or don’t you,” Mother Mary asked. “You behave you want a girl — ”

“Sure, I want a girl.”

“What kind of girl, big-shot?”

“Jus’ a lil redheaded girl.”

• • •

Sadie Madofsky’s red hair glowed darkly as the doubledecker bus rolled under the street lamp and Joey followed her down the bus aisle. She slid into an empty seat, he sat down next to her. All winter long he hadn’t been out with her, but now it was spring, and he was sure he couldn’t miss. Not if he worked her right. So she was a good girl. So what!

The good girls, the good girls…
. A guy could get them drunk, slip Spanish fly into their drink, promise to marry them, promise the moon on a silver platter. The moon tonight was white as spilled milk on the flanks of the stone library lions at Forty-Second and Fifth. Tonight, the broad avenue was a spring lane, the great shining store windows cages of electric fireflies.

Bus rides, he thought. He’d give her bus rides, walks in the park, and a free look at the dumb stars.

“I missed you, Sadie,” he said reaching for her hand. She pulled it away and he murmured plaintively. “Can’t a feller even hold your hand? You let me in the movies.” Without glancing at him, her eyes downcast, she lifted her hand from her lap, a hand stiff, as if carved out of wood. He took it between his own warm moist palms; he peered at her still face and wondered what she was thinking. As if he didn’t know. Thinking she shouldn’t be with him, thinking she should be going out with some nice little jewboy, thinking of getting married some day. Sure thing Mike, Joey told himself mockingly; let her get married, but first he’d get her primed.

Primed. Like that real estate guy Browning’d gotten Peaches primed, like Fatty Arbuckle’d gotten that Hollywood dame primed.

The bus traveled north with its lovers and its old married couples who kept a narrow space of indifference and even of hatred between their bodies, while Joey Kasow edged closer to the silent girl beside him. Their shoulders touched, she moved away, he grinned his private little grin and let go of her hand. He was in no rush. Some of the guys, and he’d been one of them last winter, would’ve pushed in on her. “Pet ‘em enough and they stop hollerin’,” the guys said. And if that didn’t work, a guy could always trick a dame. There were always ways.

“Sadie, did you miss me? I missed you. Some nights I couldn’t even sleep thinkin’ about you.”

“I don’t believe that,” she said and laughed nervously.

“Don’t believe me but I know what happened.” His voice buzzed persistently and he only became silent when the bus passed Fifty-Ninth Street. He blinked at the trees and meadows of Central Park. He chewed on his lip a second. Behind the low park wall he had glimpsed the winter pastures and woodlands of upstate New York, the roaring truck, with himself sweating in the sideroad, a haunted landscape to chill the heart. His smooth-shaven, talcum-powdered jaws clenched and he wondered what the hell was the matter with him. No sense thinking of that, no sense thinking of the Bug stewing around. Christ, let the Bug start something and he’d fill the bastid full of lead.

He averted his head from the park, stared at the east side of Fifth Avenue, at the rows of apartment buildings. The unwanted memories blew away like old newspapers in a street-corner wind. “I missed you all winter,” he said. He could smell the soapiness of her clean washed hair, and he thought of the redhead at Mother Mary’s a couple of nights ago. His blood lit like gasoline into which a match has been thrown and the Bug burned, flamed, was gone, and all that remained was a triumphant consciousness.

All through the month of May he kept seeing Sadie regularly on Wednesday nights. The leaves budded in the little parks of the city and they would sit on a bench in Madison Square or walk down paths winding like the tunnels of love in an amusement park. The little leaves under the park lamps looked like metal cut out with a shining shears, the windows of the Flatiron Building on Twenty-Third Street and Fifth gleamed yellow, and he felt as if he were playing kid games. This walking around in parks, this holding hands! This stealing a kiss when he brought her home at ten o’clock! A joke but he’d made up his mind to work her slow. Besides, he could work off steam at Mother Mary’s. But the easy breasts of Mother Mary’s girls didn’t bring him any closer to the slow rise and fall of Sadie’s small breasts fingered by his greedy eye in the passing light of a car. One of these days, he would promise himself as he sat alone in a coffee pot, one of these days….

May mornings, he would awake, the color of the sun on the drawn window shades reminding him of the deep red of her heavy coiled hair. He thought she was about the only girl in town who hadn’t bobbed it, she didn’t use lipstick, she didn’t smoke, she didn’t drink. A prize cherry.

Oh, the good girls, the good girls…
.

Days, he was busy as all the Spotter’s boys were busy. The Spotter seemed to have a speak on every block in the Thirties and Forties. Across Eighth Avenue the Spotter couldn’t go, for that was Big Bill Dwyer’s territory. And Ownie Madden and Larry Fay couldn’t be sneezed at neither. But just the same the Spotter with Quinn for a partner, had a good territory and he kept his boys on the hop. Supplying speaks and protecting speaks, running in the booze with now and then a hijacking, with Joey Kasow or Bughead Moore in charge. Joey and Bughead and a couple others were the guys picked to settle an argument where a bullet was the last word, but so far Joey didn’t even have a single notch on that new gun of his. And the latest of the Spotter’s bullet boys, truth to tell, was kind of glad. If he got the order to kill some no-good sonuvabitch, okay, but if not, that was okay, too.

The sunny days stretched before him like a shining yellow diving-board from which he plunged every Wednesday into the moist and murmuring night, the special night when he was out with Sadie, when the nighttime city rose and fell like a great swelling wave, rose and fell with her breasts tantalizing him under her thin dress, a wave of light and shadow in whose dark depth faceless men and women drifted by and where the red and green traffic lights had the magic of phosphorescence.