Old Neighborhood (20 page)

Nancy and I were D trains passing in the night. She found a job with Chemical Bank downtown and she and Patti located an apartment in the East Nineties. I volunteered to help them move and attached a U-haul trailer to my car. When we were finished loading their belongings, I bought a bottle of champagne and with paper cups we toasted The Great Escape.

“Here’s to all the SOBs from one end of the Concourse to the other who ever did me dirty. Goodbye, forever,” Nancy toasted.

“Here’s to Frankie McCarthy in particular,” Patti added, “who stood me up on a Christmas Eve to go out with Maureen Sheehy, who stuffed her bra with toilet paper.”

“Here’s to my Aunt Betty, who considers
Mary Poppins
a skin flick,” Nancy said, “and what I am doing beyond redemption, even by papal decree. And while we’re at it,” Nancy continued, “here’s to the Pope, a really cute guy, who’s always welcome at our place.”

I drove them to their apartment and helped them unload. They were so thrilled, I felt as though I were in on the releasing of two caged doves over the city. Nancy thanked me and kissed me at the door, apologizing for not being able to invite me to stay for the night, and for not wanting to go back to my apartment. “It’s silly to go back there,” she said. “I just came from there.”

A few weeks later, Nancy and Patti had a housewarming party, and I went downtown with the Walshes. I had not seen Nancy since she had moved—she told me she had been busy with setting up the apartment and becoming adjusted to her new job. We walked into the party and it occurred to me there could have been a product called Instant Young People—a few drops of vodka and they materialized to fill a room or an apartment. The place was crowded with good-looking young people, male and female, and I could not imagine how, in this short period of time, Nancy and Patti had managed to meet so many. Nancy greeted us and made introductions, to the guys who lived upstairs, the girls who lived downstairs, the guys and the girls from the bank, the friends of the guys and girls from the bank, the friends of the friends. Most of the time at the party, Jack, Terry and I, the outsiders, talked to each other. I had a few minutes in the kitchen with Nancy while she prepared hors d’oeuvres. She was the center of attention of at least five males. Probably concerned that I had been neglected, she introduced me to a fair, tall man in a suit and tie, in his early thirties, one of the older men there.

“Steve, this is Ed. Ed—Steve. Ed’s in advertising. Steve used to be in advertising.” And having made this match she left us and went to welcome people who were arriving.

“Where do you work, Ed?” I asked.

“Doyle Dane,” he said imperiously.

“It’s a good agency.”

“That’s true,” he said, barely making eye contact with me as he scanned the room for women.

“What do you do there?”

“Media.”

“I see.”

“She said
you
used to work in the field.”

“Right.”

“Where?”

“Robbins and Tolchin.”

“Doing what?”

“Mostly copy.”

“What are you doing now?” he asked, while looking over my shoulder at two young women who had just walked into the room.

“It’s a lot to explain—”

I don’t think he even heard me.

“Robbins and Tolchin, huh—” he said, tuning back in. “How are they doing since Robbins left?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been away from it.”

“Were you around when Robbins was there?” he asked offhandedly.

“We left at the same time,” I said.

The men in the room were standing on line for Nancy’s attention as though they were holding bakery tickets. I could see that I had just become someone from
her
past, a person from
her
old neighborhood. After a while the Walshes and I pushed our way through the crowd to say goodbye to Nancy and Patti and wish them luck. They were near the door with two young men who looked exactly like each other. I was finding that many of the young men at this party looked exactly like each other, but these particularly so—and then Patti told us they were twins. “Twin stockbrokers,” she said. “Isn’t that cute?”

“Does anybody here remember The Twin Cantors?” I asked. “I guess not.”

New Year’s Eve. Before this, the worst New Year’s Eve for me was the time I had a date with Barbara Raskin, who told Arthur Pollack that she did not really like me and only made the date to get even with Richie Kastner, who was taking too long in asking her out, and we went downtown to the Van Cortlandt Hotel where the guys had rented a room for a bring-your-own-bottle party, with a portable phonograph playing, and when I took Barbara Raskin home, she shook hands with me at the door. That New Year’s Eve was a tie with this one, as I lay in bed with the flu, alone in the Bronx, watching television and falling asleep before the ball dropped to start the 1980s, a date that gave me chills the flu could not even touch.

Ray Tolchin called to ask if we could meet for lunch. He had found out from Beverly that I was living in the Bronx, and I received a late night call from him, Tolchin sounding as if he had been drinking. I asked him to meet me at the candy store and he arrived by taxi this time.

“When you’re a regular, you’ll come by subway,” I said. “How are you, Ray?”

“Are we eating here?” he said disdainfully.

“We can go to our local Lutèce. Shannon’s Bar.”

“Fine. Just so long as I don’t have to live through you serving me lunch.”

I introduced Tolchin to Chris and then we walked over to Shannon’s. The customers included a few construction workers and a house drunk. The luncheon menu consisted of frozen sandwiches, thawed in a toaster oven, and Cheez Doodles, which is why I usually ate in the store. One did not come to Shannon’s for the cuisine. I ordered a grilled cheese and a Tab, Tolchin asked for a scotch on the rocks.

“I’ll also spring for the grilled cheese,” Tolchin said to O’Brien. “I’m sure it’s a specialty of the house.”

“Friend of yours?” O’Brien asked me.

“Ignore him. He’s just ticked off because his credit card isn’t good here.”

Tolchin expressed his regrets about Beverly and me, then he told me about his latest program to ward off middle age—moonlight jogging with his new young girlfriend. When I told him that I had been jogging, he was interested in discussing distances and times. I did not think this was why he asked to see me. Eventually he looked around on all sides, leaned forward, and said, “Steve, I’d like to ask a favor of you.” He removed an envelope from his jacket pocket.

“This is very confidential,” he whispered.

“Whom do you think I would tell?” I whispered back.

He handed me the envelope, checking the room.

“Ray—nobody here is in your field!”

The envelope contained a proof sheet of an ad for the herbal tea company which had once been under my supervision. The ad showed a doctor examining a man, the copy consisting of nutritional information about tea.

“I need to know what you think.”

“I feel like a Tibetan lama. You come uptown to seek truth?”

“Please, Steve. We’ve been arguing in the shop about it.”

I looked at the ad.

“I don’t know what the argument is. It’s bad. It looks like a medical trade ad.”

“That’s what I thought. Shit!”

He ordered a second scotch.

“We’re in trouble with the account, Steve. If you have any suggestions, I’d really appreciate it.”

“Do you ever drink this tea?” I asked.

“No.”

“It’s good tea.”

I examined the ad for a minute or two, then my mind drifted. I had looked at so many ads over the years, twenty years of trying to find the right clever phrase to win the day, twenty years of being zippy. I thought about the time when I had come out of the Bronx to learn that the Ivy Leaguers owned the court, how much I wanted to be like them, to pass in their world.

“What do you think, Steve?”

I focused my attention on the ad, and after a few minutes, I took a pen from Tolchin and wrote on a paper napkin:

“Once You Drink It, Regular Teas Taste Awful.”

“I’d stress the taste,” I said to Tolchin. “And I’d keep the nutritional stuff, but knock it way down in size. You could have a nice-looking person, arms folded, leaning on a whole display of the teas, looking right at you. I like the way ‘awful’ sounds. You don’t see it in ads, so it could jump right out at you. ‘Once you drink it, regular teas taste awful.’”

“It could work.”

“I think so.”

“It could work, you bastard! You rotten bastard! You solved it!” He was furious with me. “We’re going crazy in the office and you just sit there and solve it!” In his anger, he grabbed my sleeve. “You bastard!”

O’Brien came rushing over from behind the bar.

“Take it easy,” I said. “You’re on my turf.”

“You okay, Steve?” O’Brien asked.

“I’m fine. Right, Ray?”

“Yeah, he’s fine,” Tolchin said.

O’Brien went back to the bar, watching us.

“Steve, this is a waste! You have no right to be here.”

“I do have a right.”

“Look, we didn’t see things the same way. Okay. We’ll do it your way. You come back, we’ll straighten everything out.”

“I’m through with it, Ray. I don’t get anything out of this anymore.”

“You can be the president of an advertising agency! All you have to do is turn in your apron!”

“I’m sorry.”

“You can’t stay here! Who are you here?”

“Ray, if you run out of steam on what you’ve been doing all your working life, you’re in trouble. I’m lucky they took me in.”

“Come back, Steve. All is forgiven.”

“That’s my last ad. I’m finished with the zippy.”

“How much can you make here for Chrissake? How much can you
ever
make that can top what you’ll make with us?”

“I want to do something satisfying, Ray. If I make enough to earn a living, that’s good enough.”

“Steve, come on. Come back.”

“No. It all goes too fast. It was the marbles season—and now I’m a middle-aged man.”

Traffic in the store had slackened during the winter months, “We’re forty-two egg creams behind August,” Chris announced in a pained voice, going over his books. I tried to explain there had to be seasonal aspects to the business, not so many people were on the streets in the cold. He became obsessed with the weather and brought in a radio with a weather band station. “Egg creams will come back in the spring,” I said. “They always do.” Beyond that, I had nothing to offer. I had exhausted my ideas for improving the store. And I was beginning to experience cabin fever. It
was
slow in the store. The work was not enough for me. Tolchin’s appearance had a lingering effect, “Who are you here?” he had said. I also recalled my mother’s remarks from another time, “You can’t be a soda jerk forever.” And she was right.

“We have a real problem here,” I told the dog. “This requires the help of an eminent caninist, such as yourself.” Ramón did not reply, favoring a Freudian approach. “I feel that coming back here was good for me. Even having this job was good for me. So I don’t think I made a mistake by coming back. What worries me is I might make a mistake by staying.”

Neither of us had any suggestions. I decided it was time to walk my analyst.

I received a phone call at home from Sam’s daughter, Claire. Sam had suffered another heart attack. This time he had died. Sam the Man.

The funeral service was held at Riverside Chapel on the Grand Concourse, attended by about forty people, relatives, friends. I went to Hinda when I entered the chapel, kissed her, and her eyes filled with tears.

“Stevie. He was so grateful for the time you spent with him.”

“I liked being with him.”

The rabbi was in his seventies and had known Sam for fifty years. After the traditional litanies, and after he spoke of the ways in which Sam would be remembered by the family, the rabbi said:

“Sam and I had a talk before he died. He told me that when his time came, I should stand before you and I should quote from a philosopher of whom he was especially fond—Leroy Satchel Paige.”

He made us smile at his funeral. Who but Sam would have invoked Satchel Paige?

“Mr. Paige said, ‘Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move. Go very lightly on the vices—the social ramble ain’t restful. Avoid running at all times. And don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.’

“Sam Goodstein was a kind, gentle man,” the rabbi continued. “He could have been many things, but he did in his life what he enjoyed. He did not look back at what might have been, or what he should have done. He was his own person. God rest his soul.”

At Woodlawn Cemetery I stood behind the family as Sam’s coffin was lowered into the earth. Then, as part of the day’s ritual, I visited Hinda at the apartment afterward. When I was ready to leave, Hinda took me by the hand and led me to the door.

“We all wanted him to go to Florida, but he didn’t want to.”

“The Miami Dolphins. ‘How can I root for a team that’s the name of a fish?’”

“Also Claire was here, the grandchildren—and you were here, Stevie.”

She opened the drawer of a bureau in the foyer.

“I know he’d want you to have something—”

“I couldn’t have wanted anything better,” I said, as she gave me the photograph taken in front of the candy store of Sam and myself at seventeen.

My link with the neighborhood as I had once known it was broken with Sam’s passing. The new people I had met were leaving, Chris Anton, discontented, was making inquiries about luncheonettes in Queens, Jack and Terry were looking at garden apartments in Westchester, Nancy Reilly had already moved downtown. And I needed to “do better than a candy store,” as my father had said. I needed to move on, to leave the neighborhood—just as I had done twenty years before. Only this time I was not ashamed of who I was, and where I came from.

N
EW NEIGHBORHOODS DO NOT
have candy stores and the local coffee shop in the area where I had moved served liquor. My apartment was in the East Seventies of Manhattan, a renovated walk-up, a “junior three,” the bedroom no more than a sleeping alcove. The area’s most important architectural landmark was the newly enlarged frozen-food section of the nearby Gristede’s supermarket. The console radio and the other nostalgia pieces I had brought with me from the Bronx took on an added radiance in the banal plasterboard box in which I now lived.