The Mayor of Lexington Avenue (12 page)

“Thank you for suggesting that, Father. I’ll certainly talk to Michael and my husband about it.” Father Burke smiled back but he could tell far better than Johnny that she was not interested.

Johnny couldn’t wait to tell Mikey about the conversation. He found him in the bathroom, the one on the second floor that nobody else used.

“You can’t have anybody come in while you’re puking,” Mikey had told him that very first morning when they were searching for a place for Johnny to spill his guts.

Mikey was leaning over the bowl but he appeared to be done. He might have had a few more dry heaves in him but nothing more of substance was coming out.

“Something real bad just happened,” Johnny said. Mikey was in no mood for games. The headache was on him now and he was hanging on for dear life.

“Whaat?”

“Father Burke just told your mother you’d make a good priest. He asked her to talk to you and she said she would—with your dad.” Mikey, in all his pain, ventured a weak laugh, although he didn’t move from the bowl. He wasn’t laughing so much at what Johnny said but the way he said it. As if his parents were going to stuff him in a bag and deliver him to Father Burke.

“What’s so funny?” Johnny asked, a little angry that Mikey wasn’t as upset as himself.

“My mother was just being polite to Father Burke. She’s not going to talk to me and neither is my father. It’s nothin’.” Johnny was a little disappointed at Mikey’s reaction, so he gave him the other piece of news.

“He called you the Mayor of Lexington Avenue.”

“Who?”

“Father Burke. He said you knew more people than he did and he had the pulpit.” Mikey just smiled.

“I like it,” Mikey said. “It’s a perfect nickname for you.”

“Me? He didn’t say it about me, he said it about you.”

“Who cares what he said? You’re the Mayor of Lexington Avenue. You know as many people as me. Besides, a mayor’s got to be smart and he’s got to know how to run things. That’s you, Johnny, not me. People look up to you. They know you got something that the rest of us don’t have.”

“Really?” Johnny asked. “Me?”

“Yup. That’s why the Mayor of Lexington Avenue is so perfect for you. I’m going to make a prediction, Johnny. Someday, you’re going to do something great—like the things a mayor does. I’m not sure what it is or even if it’s one thing but it’ll be about me and you. And when it’s over—because you’ll finish it, whatever it is, you finish everything you start—I want you to remember this day and what I told you.”

“Come on, Mikey. You’re scaring me with this vision voodoo shit. Why don’t we just forget about what Father Burke said?”

“No. Now tell me you’ll remember.”

“C’mon, cut it out.”

“Tell me, Johnny.”

“All right, I’ll remember. I promise.”

“Good. Now, if Father Burke knew the other half of the people we know, he’d have another name for the both of us.”

The “other half” were the people in the neighborhood Father Burke would never meet. Jimmy the Shoemaker’s was a great place to meet those people. So were the streets between two and six in the morning when your parents thought you were sleeping.

Jimmy the Shoemaker was actually a shoe repairman. The neighborhood bestowed the title of “Shoemaker” on him because he was so adept at his craft. Nicknames—they were everywhere. On Saturdays, however, Jimmy did double duty, plying another trade at which he would never excel. Jimmy Donatello liked to gamble about as much as he liked to breathe and, although he worked hard and was an excellent shoe repairman, he tried not to let work interfere with his gambling, especially on Saturday.

The front part of the store, although it contained the one big noisy machine Jimmy needed to do his repairs, was rather small. Mikey worked the shoeshine booth, which was elevated and had two chairs each equipped with “golden stirrups” where customers set their feet for the shine. Mikey always positioned their feet just right before he began his work.

“The worst thing that can happen,” he told his young protégé Johnny, “is one of their feet fall off the stirrup. So set it in there good. Lock the heel in place.”

All the action happened in the back room, which was larger than the front. It started at eight in the morning when Jimmy opened up. Artie was the first to arrive. Artie was like clockwork. He was usually there before the boys and sometimes before Jimmy. Being the low man on the totem pole, Johnny’s first job on Saturday morning was to go up the block to Pete’s restaurant for coffee and cigarettes. He loved those early weekend mornings when the city was just waking up and the streets were empty except for the shopkeepers working like busy little ants, setting up for the day. There was something so clean and crisp and serene about it all. Pete would start to prepare the containers of coffee as soon as he walked in the door. There was no need to speak. The orders were the same every Saturday—Jimmy was milk and one sugar, Artie was black, no sugar, and the boys were regular (milk and two sugars).

By the time he returned to the store, the first game of blackjack had already begun. The front door had a little bell so Jimmy in the back room could hear a customer entering. He had a great knack for leaving a game, waiting on a customer, and jumping right in where he left off. On Saturdays, however, he had the added luxury of Mikey, who had worked at the store for years. He not only knew how to use the machines and repair shoes, he knew the customers. Jimmy took great pride in knowing a customer’s shoes without ever looking at a ticket. By watching closely, Mikey had acquired the same talent. He practically ran the store on Saturdays and while he was busy taking care of customers, Johnny would shine shoes. The boys lived for Saturdays.

Vito showed up with Carmine at ten and the craps game began. The back room was full by then, which meant there were ten guys back there at most. Smoke so thick you couldn’t see yourself, and dark except for a few lights in the corners where the games were being played—a real den of iniquity. Everybody talked at once and money passed from one hand to the next with words like, “I got twenty on this one” or “I got you covered.” On the rare occasions they were allowed to go in the back, the boys were mesmerized by the show.

Vito was their favorite. Vito was cool. He was always impeccably dressed and he always stopped for a shine before going in the back. It wasn’t just that he gave a big tip, although that helped. Vito actually noticed them, spent some time with them, showed an interest in their lives. To everybody else they were just kids, although that changed when Mikey spread the word that Johnny was “the Mayor of Lexington Avenue.” After that, everybody wanted to get a shine from “Hizzoner.” Johnny didn’t like it at first. He felt like a fraud since Father Burke had pinned the name on Mikey, but he started feeling better about it when his pockets were bulging with dollar bills.

“You boys pokin’ any of them high school girls yet?” Vito would ask every week.

“Yeah. Three this week,” Mikey would reply. Sometimes he’d change the number. It didn’t matter. Vito knew he was lying.

“Listen to old Vito,” he would say—he was about thirty-five at the time. “You gotta treat them nice. Treat them with respect and they’ll be all over you. You gotta dress nice too. They don’t wanna go out with no bums.” Then he’d laugh and the boys would laugh with him and he’d prance into the back room. Vito was a dandy in his silk shirts and sharkskin pants but the boys knew he was not a person to mess with.

At one or thereabouts, Frank would arrive. He never came alone and he never entered the store until Jimmy came out and invited him in. Guys were running out of money by one o’clock, and Frank was there to replenish their pockets.

Frank was a loan shark and his arrival always caused a stir. When Jimmy went out to get him, some guys would disappear, quickly walking out the front door, their shoulders hunched, their hats down over their foreheads. They never acknowledged Frank and he never acknowledged them.

“Frank’s a gentleman,” Jimmy told the boys one day after everyone had left. “He never tries to collect when he’s at my store.” Apparently the guys who disappeared every week when Frank arrived didn’t know about that part of the arrangement.

Gambling was only part of the program at the shoe store. Jimmy’s nephew Tony worked around the block at Doc Feeney’s animal hospital. Doc was a regular shine but only on weekday afternoons, never weekends. He always sat in the same chair, put his already-shined-the-day-before loafers on the golden stirrups and philosophized about life. Two things were constant with Doc: He was always drunk, although most folks couldn’t tell, and he included everyone in the conversation.

“What are you kids smoking for?” he challenged Mikey and Johnny one afternoon, a cigarette dangling from his jaundiced fingers. Doc had the knack of hanging an ash on his cigarette forever. He wouldn’t flick the ash off and he wouldn’t allow it to drop of its own accord.

“’Cause we like it,” Mikey replied. Mikey was respectful but never deferential to adults.

“Yeah. But it’ll kill you. If I knew then what I know now, I never woulda started.”

“Why don’t you quit?” Mikey asked.

“Can’t. Besides, I like it too much. If I’m gonna go, why not go from something I like?”

Jimmy piped in then. “Hey, ya go when your time’s up. There was a guy in this neighborhood, you know, a rich guy from Park Avenue, rich like you, Doc.” They all laughed at Doc, who was from Westchester. “I used to do his shoes. This guy ran every day—over to the park, around the reservoir. Never smoked, never drank. Every time he came in here he was drinking orange juice. Dropped dead on the street at thirty-five years old. When your time comes, it comes.”

“When my time comes, I want to be pickled,” Doc replied. Johnny and Mikey looked at each other. That was one wish they knew was going to come true.

Carl worked for Doc. He’d been at the animal hospital for twenty years and like Doc, Carl was always drunk. The difference was that Carl actually looked drunk. He was black and Doc made him wear a blue uniform, probably so people would think he was the janitor or something. His pants were always hanging down below the crack, which you couldn’t see because his shirt was always hanging out over his pants. Carl only had a few teeth and they were a cross between yellow-green and dark brown. His cigarette, a Lucky Strike, was always dangling from his lips about to fall every time he opened his mouth, which was constantly. For the first year they knew him, the boys never understood a word Carl said, partly because of the way he talked and partly because of his constant state of inebriation. Eventually, they picked up the language, just like people living in a foreign country start understanding what people around them are saying. Osmosis maybe. Whatever. When they finally started to understand, the boys found Carl to be quite funny.

Doc was funny too in his own sardonic way, but Doc was an aristocrat—perfectly manicured, perfect white teeth, richly dressed. The thought that the two worked closely together was hysterical.

It wasn’t until Jimmy’s nephew Tony started working at the animal hospital that the boys—and Jimmy—learned just how close Carl and the Doc were.

“Carl does everything, including the surgeries,” Tony told them. “The Doc and Carl make the diagnosis together, then Doc goes and meets the people in his office. They never see Carl. He comes to work through the back door.”

“No kiddin’?” Jimmy asked. He was as surprised as the boys.

“Yeah,” Tony replied. “I’m his assistant and I don’t know nothin’. Carl gives ’em the anesthesia and cuts ’em open, jawin’ all the time about who knows what. If those people from Park Avenue ever found out about who was operating on their animals, we’d all be in jail.”

“Well, I’ll be,” Jimmy murmured. “Old Doc’s got more balls than I thought. I don’t think Carl ever got past the third grade.”

Mikey was right, Father Burke didn’t know the half of it.

Fifteen

Joaquin Sanchez bought a boat with a trailer the day he retired from the Miami police department. It was a used twenty-six-foot outboard whaler with one seat and a small canvas canopy. Joaquin didn’t want or need any company. Like Rudy, Joaquin enjoyed nothing better in life than to be on the water by himself—observing, feeling, being a part of nature. Catching fish was secondary. Joaquin had a fish camp just outside of Indiantown on a small tributary that fed into Lake Okeechobee. When he wanted to fish for grouper or mahi, he trailered his boat from his home in Homestead to the Keys. It was a solitary life but one he enjoyed totally.

“After twenty-five years being a Mexican cop in a Cuban town, I deserve to do nothing,” he told his friend and former partner Dick Radek over the phone one day. He was kidding but he meant it, too. Only Dick, who had served beside him for twenty years in patrol and as a detective, understood both the humor and the serious side of the statement. Discrimination had many layers. Cubans, who were often snubbed by whites, rarely missed the opportunity to harass the Mexican cop for nothing more than doing his job.

Dick was a private investigator now, making big money with some hotshot lawyer in Vero Beach. They usually talked once a week. They had watched each other’s backs and saved each other’s lives too many times to lose contact at this point.

“I’m going to be like your ex-wife,” Dick told Joaquir when he retired. “You’re never going to be able to get rid of me.”

Joaquin laughed. “Don’t sell yourself short, my friend. You’re much better-looking than she was.”

From time to time, when Dick needed help on a job, he called Joaquin. He called him ten minutes after Tracey gave him the Bass Creek assignment.

“Hey partner, wanna make some extra change?”

“Not really. Working as an executive for Exxon for all those years, retiring with that multimillion-dollar severance, I don’t need the money. But humor me—do I get to spy on the wife this time? Is she decent-looking? Does she have bamboo curtains?”