Train Tracks (8 page)

FOURTEEN

Setting a Peanut Man on Fire

Coming of Age, 1952

A
s a kid Schwartz was a normal, if somewhat malicious, mischievous type.

He once set a “Planters Peanut” man on fire, on Broadway.

It was a holiday break, cold but not yet freezing so probably around Thanksgiving. We had taken the long subway ride in from Jamaica and were absorbing all the action that Times Square had to offer to two twelve-year-olds in from the green-carpeted world of the suburbs.

Coming out of the tube onto Forty-second Street, there was a mini playland of machines right next to the porno shop. In those days, porn was illegal so this place was put up as an “art” shop. Selling mainly B&W glossies of bimbos down on their luck—to us each a beauty, a masturbatory beauty, good for many hours of holiday fun.

Invariably the perverts who liked young boys stalked this recreational area. They would watch us, Schwartz the tall kid and me the pip-squeak. He would have the “nerve” to leaf through the thousands of glossies and girlie mags while I just hung on his side nervously stealing glances, expecting to be tossed out any minute.

As we exited, some gangly perv in a beat-up overcoat would approach us.

“You men want to see a real collection of girlie pictures?”

“Ge-get away from us . . .” said S.

“No. Don't be afraid. I mean it. I've got pictures and movies of girls, naked girls in my place if you want to see them.”

And with a push, the perv would see his prey flee.

Up in the clear light of day we'd breathe freely again, taking in the mobs of neon and food smells and cops and horses and horseshit.

So S needed a little fun after the run-in with the queer. There it was! A poor man walking down Broadway with a papier-mâché peanut body and top hat, complete with tux tails, and his little cane of peanut brittle tapping the mica-chipped sidewalk.

Taking out his Zippo lighter, my big bad friend snuck up behind the guy and trailed him, all the while scratching the flint to ignite a flame on the rear of the man's shell.

Of course the man inside the peanut outfit yelled at the kid. And his frightened eyes touched me, forcing me to grab S's hand to stop. But shaking me off he pursued his prey, his lighter clicking until the shell had ignited, if but slowly. And then as we ran away, we saw the poor man tear his shell off and throw it in the gutter just as it roared into flame.

So this was no little prank. The kid was a vicious punk, no doubt about it. And I, always self-thought of as a “good” boy, was little more than a co-nastyholic, somehow egging the principal on with my protestations.

Not to explain us away or anything, but, more for the record, I want to explain how he got that way. He wasn't born mean or anything, but
became
that way largely due to his crazy mother.

And she wasn't to blame.

It was those Benzedrine shots she got from that doctor in Jersey who was helping her lose weight. That set her off for four to six hours, leaving the family in a nightmare by the time darkness rolled around.

I remember one winter night in particular. It stands out so clearly because his life as a boy ended.

We had both gone to his house about five o'clock after an afternoon of play.

His mother was nowhere to be seen. Calling for her all around the “sprawling” brick ranch house next to Vanderbilt's old private motorway, we heard a low groan coming from the “living” room.

Once in the usually off-limits room, I quickly took in the white sofa and side chairs hermetically sealed in thick plastic, the curio cabinets and other middle-class trappings I associated with great wealth—and then she charged like a mad cow.

“Look what you did to my wrists,” she hollered. “Look how you scarred them, made them bleed.” And she tried to scratch his eyes out!

I stood horrified.

They struggled and we ran out. When we came back, after about thirty minutes of walking around in the freezing dark streets, she was, again, nowhere to be found.

So we just tiptoed up to his large room and talked real quietly to each other and to his younger brother, then ten but still referred to as “the baby” by his parents.

About seven o'clock his father, “Sy,” came home, exhausted from his day on the truck he owned as a franchisee. The minute he crossed the door, the Benzied-up woman ran up screaming, “Sy, Sy, look what your son did to me,” and she then broke down sobbing, all the time muttering that my friend had beat her with a chain!

Naturally, Sy charged after his eldest son. Yelling at him, “You can't do that to your mother, I'll show you.” He cornered him in the upstairs bedroom.

As the younger brother and I watched in total shock, father and son came to blows.

Throwing real punches, they fought to a draw, the father satisfied that he'd fulfilled his duties, the son shaking with rage.

And then poor S grabbed for his oversize piggy bank, an object I had envied for years.

Holding it up in the air for what seemed like a very long while, I sensed his life as he knew it ebbing away. His eyes were torn and confused, filled with rage and self-doubt, eyes I would not see again until years later when I would visit him in the psycho ward at Fort Dix after his breakdown.

But then, on that horrid night in Queens, he was just an unlucky kid who threw his glass bank to the floor with a crash, a childhood of coins flying every which way on the cool turquoise carpet.

(As the truth later came out, his drug-maddened mother, it seems, had beat her
own
wrists with the dog chain earlier in the day! Even going so far as to have cried to the postman at noon, telling him what her son had done to her!)

FIFTEEN

Pennies for Beethoven

Morning sleep, afternoon wine . . .

Much idle gossip with women

J
EWISH ADMONITION

W
omen talking around the kitchen table. The sound of a serrated bread knife gently caressing the fallen crumbs across the thick plastic table cover. Back across the plastic cloth, the crumbs sifted and sorted, women's voices, didactics towards the ever-changing truths.

I, the male child, listening from the living room, or from the refrigerator. Listening to the women talking. Not businesswomen, nor career women, but housewives, later called “homemakers” (and were they that!), now again, “Mom!”

Addicted to that sound, and today's men too busy cheating each other to bother with such chitchat. No matter how I've tried, I seem to find myself listening to people listening to my voice . . .

It is late afternoon, very late.

I am very well dressed aboard the Larkspur Ferry. A high-speed, yacht-like vessel, mind you, not a dumpy Staten Island plow horse, with a lusty mustachioed Greek concessionaire pouring giant drinks at three in the afternoon. Soft plush seats, but I sit and walk outside gazing at the cormorants and gulls, the windsurfers who've recently discovered this channel, the Redwood rowing team dreaming of the Charles, and, to my satisfaction, the beginning of the early evening traffic crawl on 101 halfway up the low-rolling hills of Marin.

Sighting the haphazardly buried shore pilings with algae growth I think, “God, but I love the water.” Always with a sense of loss, for something not quite present. If I love the water and I'm
at
the water, why feel a sense of incompleteness that I ought to be living on the water in order to enjoy the water? Why not “be here and now” and have the water.

So I take my big drink to the upper deck, observe the bay's green tint today, sigh for the weaker prisoners, reflect again on the remarkable piece of real estate under San Quentin State Prison, and settle down to enjoy the ride.

Clear to Vallejo and beyond, the rich, volcanic wine lands.

A looping gull riding a wind wave not rippling a feather. His sense of energy total and not classroom bought, Russell, my son, eighteen in May, enjoying his last few months of his senior year at Redwood, driving his perfect old Mustang, stealing perfect white bases, enjoying his popularity as the all-American boy.

Tomorrow night's the junior prom. He'll be taking a “rich” girl from San Francisco to her school's dance. She's been calling him for about a week; he's sort of avoiding her, because he told me last week on our drive to the shooting range at the Circle S Ranch, out in Tomales, she's not quite pretty enough.

Yes, she's fun. Yes, she's intelligent. Yes, she's kind to him. But not quite pretty enough.

I tried to suggest that perfect looks come at a high price, that the less-than-beautiful women are often the best friends . . . and then let it go. Our interest soon shifted to the thrill of killer rifles ripping paper targets. The smell of gunpowder, the frightening report of large bore guns, and the crazy types who always appear.

Since early on, I've known I would be no good at business. I lacked the Midas touch, the ability to sell, the desire really to cater to people. Maybe I'm basically the “lazy Mexican” my father thought I represented. He often told me I reminded him of a Mexican with a sombrero falling asleep against a wall. Sunny, I hope, and besides, all the Mexicans I've met have been remarkable, hard workers! They work like ancient Israelites with uncanny stamina, uncomplaining.

Lawyers love to fee me $275 an hour, or $4 a minute while driving through the Sausalito tunnel. Their car phone, cellular Captain Marvels. The higher the fee, the wiser the man, right?

“Pennies for Beethoven” is how Janet put it, when I complained about my lack of hourly consulting fees. SO I stopped as soon as I started. Melted the plastic shingle.

Now I just dream like the biblical prophet my father confused with a cartoon “lazy Mexican.”

SIXTEEN

The Speculator (in a
Garden of Numbers)
*

H
e was not
of a wealthy family. His father, a small shopkeeper, now dead, had managed to
rectify his penniless immigrant childhood position but never managed to attain
what was known as a “comfortable” status. The son was warned about investments
at an early age. On one of their many summer rides in the Catskill Mountains,
they both watched a raceway being dozed and carved out of a distant cornfield.
The small father lectured the smaller boy, “Sure, they move a little earth
around, get you to invest in their scheme, and after they've milked the public
for all they can get they declare bankruptcy. They can keep their
racetrack.”

The small boy believed his father's every word. He
worshipped the forceful, handsome man for his ability to say loudly what he
felt, not just within the confines of the household, but outside as well. The
man knew what he was talking about and told you so.

The raceway was slowly but certainly constructed
and eventually operated very successfully. Those who had purchased “shares” in
the embryonic raceway corporation were rewarded for their faith with substantial
capital gains. The son never mentioned the completed track to his father, though
they would pass it each summer over the years. There would be no point in
proving his father wrong; he was right about too many other things for this
error to have any impact on their relationship.

As the little boy became a man, his father grew
neither more rich, nor more poor. His income remained the same throughout the
years, rising just slightly with inflation. The small family home was always
secure, the children had enough money to attend a municipal college, and the two
parents, with simple wants, were able to “go away” every summer to a bungalow in
the mountains. The family dry goods shop was managed with honesty and without
credit, and provided a moderate but secure income.

The father would justify his moderate position from
time to time. As one friend or another would move to a more expensive home, take
a cruise, or purchase something truly showy, he would lecture the boy, his
daughter, and his wife about his friends' foolishness. He simply did not believe
in the American Dream. He smelled a fraud, but was unable to prove his
suspicions until many years later.

One of his friends, a corpulent man he had grown up
with on the Lower East Side, went bankrupt. The journey back from his expensive
home “out on the island” to one room in a poor relation's apartment with his
three children took less than one year. It seems that women no longer knitted as
they did during and after the second war. The little man's children were pulled
out of school to earn their food while the once-prosperous yarn merchant became
a clerk in a competitor's shop.

Sadly, the boy's father took pleasure in his
friend's plight. “I told you he was overextending himself. All the years he came
in here and shot his mouth off. Look where it got
him . . . all the time borrowing from Peter to pay
Paul . . . I knew all along it was no good.”

The bankruptcy of the yarn man served to shore up
the position of the dry goods man against investments and credit borrowing. The
boy learned to respect his father's position even more firmly through this
lesson in reality.

Another of his father's successful friends came to
ruin in a different way. His daughter died from an overdose of heroin in an
infamous New York hotel frequented by unsuccessful artists.

Once again the man's moderate approach to life
seemed to be the right one. Though his children would not distinguish themselves
in any great way they would not bring shame to the family, either.

A
s
time would have it, the dry goods man died in middle age of a second heart
attack. The boy, named Sam, now a shaky man of thirty-one, had on his own
managed to accrue what would have been a small fortune to his father. The
capital was not exactly earned illegally, but it could not be said that the
money had been earned from legal endeavors, either. It seems that taxes were not
paid on income derived from a bookstore that drew substantial profits by selling
books purchased from illegitimate sources.

The young man managed to save between eighty and
ninety thousand dollars in a little more than three years. The cash sat in a
safe cemented into the basement floor of Sam's mother's house. The young
merchant let it sit there without making any investments. He distrusted Wall
Street as a result of his father's indoctrination over the years and never
learned much about any other financial “opportunities” available to the small
investor, either. However, he always heard that real estate was good. A nice,
safe way to build a fortune. But each time Sam would make an offer to purchase a
small parcel of land, the deal would not be consummated. He would make an
unrealistically low offer, which would be rejected. On receiving back his
deposit, he would feel as though he had somehow made money, simply because he
had not lost any.

The five or six parcels he failed to buy increased
two or three times in value over the three years he kept track of their prices.
This confirmed Sam's appraisal of his business sense; he was a shrewd buyer but
lacked the faith necessary to put his money into an investment. After three
years of testing himself, he was ripe for making a dramatic move. He would no
longer wait around to die, like his father, while enormous profits could be
realized by signing his name to a few slips of paper.

S
am
was an avid reader. He not only sold books but inherited that love for the
written word that was woven through the fabric of his people. He had just read a
small book about useful plants of the world and was convinced that coffee and
cocoa were highly underpriced products of the soil.

Cocoa, he thought, is an agricultural product with
good associations. It mixes well into a nice steamy hot drink, is easily whipped
into chocolate, and in general seems to be loved in some form by most people.
Sam reasoned that the cocoa growers would soon unify their positions demanding
much higher prices. Coffee and cocoa were both grown only in the tropics; and
the industrialized nations, which happened to be concentrated in the temperate
zone, would learn to pay more for their addictions.

Through an acquaintance in the shop, Sam learned of
the commodity exchanges, where products of every kind were bought and sold by
both those who utilized the products and those who merely speculated or invested
on the rise or fall of prices.

By making a few phone calls, he learned the name of
a commodity man at the largest brokerage house in the city. After a few cordial
conversations with the broker, during which he learned the rudiments of
speculating in cocoa, Sam the speculator was anxious to cash in on his
hunch.

The broker told him that a minimum amount of five
thousand dollars would be required. Anxious as the young man was, he did not
rush over with the money. For several days he just phoned the broker to get the
opening and closing prices and ask a few new questions. Finally, the broker
pushed him a little. He suggested that the market appeared ready to rise and
told Sam to get his deposit in an account.

That evening the speculator decided to go to the
safe and withdraw five thousand cash.

In the morning he failed to open the bookstore for
the first time in three years. Instead, the cash was converted into traveler's
checks in six separate banks. Sam thought this would throw the tax people off
should they be following his cash flow. He also did not want to alarm the
broker. The exchange at each bank went well with the exception of the fourth
transaction, where the teller asked Sam why the money had such a peculiar smell.
He acted dumb, muttering something about a trip to Spain while remembering that
the years in the safe had probably caused his “dough” to mildew. Leaving the
bank, he was sure the dumb clerk would report the incident to her superior. He
only hoped the supervisor had become used to mildewed bills in this time of
inflation, when many people were removing their stashes from little corners of
their world.

After the final transaction of traveler's checks
into the cashier's check, a brief subway ride took him to the center of world
finance. Following a few directionless meanderings, he found the brokerage
house. It occupied an entire city block, was of brown glass and steel, and rose
higher than any other building in the district. The young man felt better about
his decision when he surveyed the magnitude of the structure. New thoughts came
pouring from his brain. “So that's how such buildings come to be.” He was
thinking: “Men buy and sell, sell and buy, all over the world and this company
takes a commission whether the investors make or lose. Either way the brokerage
houses profit.”

He was amused by the cleverness of the scheme but
still felt positive about his decision to “get into it” as he weaved his way
through a maze of people in the lobby who were glued to changing stock prices
flashing above their heads. At once, he no longer sneered at these people. He
understood them, was part of them for the first time. Those phony artist friends
of his would not need to know about his new attitude towards them; it would be
sufficient that at last he was part of reality.

Once on the twenty-seventh floor, he found his way
to the commodity broker. They both acted intimate with one another, as though
through the telephone conversations they had discovered they were brothers and
were now, at last, meeting for the first time since their separation at an
orphanage.

For a while they both just sat and watched the
gigantic board, where prices for wheat, corn, soybeans, live cattle, hog
bellies, coffee, cocoa, silver, platinum, and other items clicked and changed
with mechanical excitement.

Sam noticed that the broker was not alone before
the big board. He was one of a dozen or so brokers in the large and
well-designed room. As the young man casually glanced at the other faces, the
cigarette-stained fingers of this very thin broker tapped nervously on his desk.
The thin man whispered, “You see that man in the
back . . . at the last desk? He earned over one million last
year, just in trading cocoa.”

The young man was impressed but not astonished. He
knew people made that kind of money and here was one of them in the flesh. That
the million-dollar earner did not look different from anybody else made him all
the more believable. As the young man imagined what the rich man's home and wife
looked like, the kind of dinners prepared for them by their cook, and the manner
in which they entertained themselves, he asked the broker, almost in a whisper,
“He makes that much just from speculating in cocoa?”

The thin, nervous broker educated him. “No. No. We
are not allowed to speculate for our own accounts. He makes that on commissions
alone. He is the man who handles the Hershey account. He buys and sells all
their cocoa for them.”

“So that's how they get their chocolate!” Sam felt
much more involved with the real world than ever before. He realized that soon
he would be participating in the buying and selling of chocolate, just as this
international corporation did from right there in that office, simply by having
his broker watch the changing figures.

He gave the check to his broker and watched him
walk with it to an accounting office at the far end of the room and place it in
a pneumatic tube. Jim, the broker, returned and said, “It's done. Down the
tubes, by now. Your account number is zero-one-three-seven.”

The young man was made a bit nervous by the
broker's choice of words, but he immediately realized the expression “down the
tubes” probably originated in such investment houses to describe the passage of
messages, checks, etc., through pneumatic tubes, which traversed the building.
He further reassured himself by repeating the many names of the partners of the
famous company.

Sam made no investment that day at the suggestion
of his broker. He was advised to wait “for a dip” in the rising price of cocoa
and then “get in.” During his visit he was shown around the offices on the
twenty-seventh floor, the rudiments of the cocoa market were explained and a
packet of materials handed to him, explaining in more detail the nature of the
commodity business.

The broker led him to the elevators and told him to
phone the next day at 9:30
A.M.,
one half hour
before cocoa began trading, when they would “make a battle plan” for the day's
trading.

On the subway ride back uptown to the bookshop, the
investor felt elated. He glanced through the booklets, hoping somebody might see
what he was reading, but decided to wait until that evening to carefully study
each word.

P
ropped up on three pillows in the large four-poster bed he had crafted
some years before, the speculator devoured the facts of his life. He learned
that the New York Cocoa Exchange operated from ten
A.M
. to three
P.M
. and that each
“contract” consisted of 30,000 net pounds of cocoa beans in shipping bags. For
$2,300, he would be able to buy one contract of cocoa on a margin account basis.
This sum represented less than 10 percent of the approximate cost of the 30,000
pounds of beans.

He was reassured to learn that trading limits were
established. Each contract could only rise or fall two cents from the previous
day's closing price. Each one-cent change represented $300 in the cost of the
contract. So, if the price rose the daily limit of two cents per pound, he would
be ahead $600 per contract. Conversely, he could lose that amount each day the
price fell down the limit.