Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue (4 page)

On Tenth Street they sold only smoke. If they had sold crack on Tenth Street, Nathan would have had to move his shop, and he did not want to move because his parents owned the building, and the only way a photocopy shop could keep open charging as little as he did, which was all his clientele could afford, was to have a rent-free office space.

Young, well-dressed uptowners came down to buy smoke on Tenth Street in the same well-waxed, expensive cars as were used by the aging Jews who drove in from Long Island and New Jersey to shop in the delis and fish shops. The smoke crowd drove down on Friday night, the smoked fish crowd drove in on Sunday The neighborhood was a respectable drug-trafficking area, although it's true, the pushers did not always look too good. There was one huge man with a big mop of black hair and furious eyes who would hobble down the street looking as if his head were about to explode and he was struggling to keep it on.

And none of this bothered Nathan. It was his neighborhood, and he liked the way the street was lined with people who made a distinction between him and outsiders. Nobody said, "Smoke?" to him, because he belonged. Sometimes a new pusher would be working the evening and he would say to Nathan, "Smoke?" because he didn't know. One of the regulars would lightly punch the new man in the biceps and say,
"Qué hace, maricón?
He don't fucking want you."

The pushers made Nathan feel safe. No one was going to do anything to him, his family, or his photocopy shop as long as the pushers were out there. Nobody came onto this block to rob or bother children or steal cars. And the pushers tried hard to keep people like Nathan appreciative of them. They seemed to know that at any time, the people of the neighborhood could rise up and push them out.

Nathan knew how to be just cold enough so that they knew to respect him, but not so cold that they would single him out if things went wrong some night. Because he knew, though you never saw it, that they had guns. At least the lookouts did. The ones nonchalantly passing their evenings on the corners. Ruben probably had a gun.

Recently, Nathan's attitude had begun to shift. The change had started with Sarah's birth. He could not forget those hours of holding Sonia's hands while she writhed in pain that he could not even imagine, struggling through what was termed "an easy labor." The pushing, the struggling, the tearing. Sarah came out in a gracefully arced little swan dive into the doctor's hands. It was the only graceful motion in the entire ordeal. He held her, looked into her curious eyes. She was already preparing questions.

As he turned to look at Sonia, his eyes had swept through the room like the panning camera of a documentary filmmaker, and he was astounded by the sight. The room looked like the scene of a massacre. Blood was splattered on the walls, clotted on sheets, puddled on the floor, under the table. Why was it like this? What had nature intended? This, then, was life, a violent and dangerous struggle.

And that had made him start looking differently at the streets of his home. They were full of garbage and disease and drug dealers with loaded guns. Probably one of them had shot Eli Rabbinowitz, a nice man who never hurt anyone, thought Nathan, who had never tried to give him a massage. Nathan was having these thoughts now as he walked down his street, hoping Sarah was not hearing the discussions of Eli Rabbinowitz's remains. One dealer insisted that "the fucking cops spent all fucking mañana fitting pieces together so they could put together his face to see who the fucking
pen-dejo
was." Fortunately, the one who insisted that the body was headless and that the police were still searching the neighborhood for the missing part was imparting this news in Spanish.

Should he be like the new smarts? Nathan wondered. Like Maya's parents? Did he need to start earning money for types of schools he had never heard of? What did he have to do to make life safe for her?

When Sarah was riding on his shoulders, he felt an unreasonable hostility stir at the sight of the pushers. He didn't want Ruben's sweet-faced, friendly nod when Sarah was up on his shoulders, waving and laughing at the funny world. But there
it
was. Sarah looked down from Nathan's shoulders at the sweet-faced man and drew his portrait in her notebook, which she balanced on her father's head—two zigzags across the page.

N
ATHAN WOKE UP
on a Friday morning with the unshakable sense that during this day he would commit a catastrophic error in judgment. Something had been written by the gods, and as he walked to the Meshugaloo Copy Center, Nathan Seltzer knew this was one Friday that he would regret.

He pulled open the gate of his store, rolling up a dozen indecipherable spray-painted names. "Seltzer!" shouted out Carmela, a name that means "Candy" Carmela was already living above the shop when he first opened it, one of his father's old tenants who paid a few dollars rent. She spent the entire summer sitting half out her window on the fire escape. There used to be many more on the other fire escapes, and they all shouted to one another. But in recent summers almost everyone had bought air conditioners, which hummed and dripped, and they had all gone inside and closed their windows, leaving Carmela with no one to shout at but Nathan and his customers. She planted her spacious denim-covered posterior—a nice posterior, though a bit overstated for white people, as she herself once observed—on the window ledge and twisted to see the street traffic below. "What's the
probkma?
Slow down.
Quiere
me to take you to Cristofina to read
tu fortuna?"

Nathan had never seen a reason to believe that Cristofina could read fortunes. But Carmela, on the other hand, had uncanny abilities.

People often sense that they are about to encounter fate, but usually once they do, they don't recognize it. That is why they go to fortune-tellers. At first Nathan thought his fateful moment would be the meeting. It was a slow summer Friday, and as Nathan decided to close his shop a few minutes early to get to his meeting, turning off a Beethoven quartet before its urgency had quite mounted and putting out water and dried food for the always hungry Pepe Le Moko—wasn't he finding enough mice to eat?—he had a sense of some misfortune
beshirt
—fated. It was even possible that the entire reason for this doomed feeling he had awakened with was that he knew he had this meeting. He had been contacted by a growing chain of photocopy stores called Copy Katz. Nathan thought it was a clever name. The man's name was Ira Katz.

Nathan took a subway, the F train from Houston, to their offices west of Fifth Avenue in the Fifties. Immediately he could see that Ira was not the owner of Copy Katz in the way that he, Nathan, was the owner of Meshugaloo Copy Center. It was more complicated for this fast-growing company that already had fifteen copy stores in Manhattan alone.

Their office was in a building so perfectly air-conditioned that it was climateless, odorless, temperatureless—an experiment in total sensory deprivation. Nathan tried to remember from his childhood if this was one of the tests given to qualify as an astronaut. Could you withstand several hours in a climateless environment? The chairs were all very large, which may have been intended to make the people in them feel very small, the same way Sarah sat in chairs dreaming of the day when her legs could reach the floor.

"What is Meshugaloo Copy?" Ira Katz wanted to know, probably noting that his name wasn't Nathan Meshugaloo.

"It comes from a song. From the sixties?"

He could see that they were worried about the mere mention of the sixties. Their offer had been simple—or at least that was how they'd put it. Five hundred thousand dollars for his business on Tenth Street.

"Why do you want it?"

"We like the location."

"Tenth Street?" Katz could be a drug dealer. You could never tell.

"We believe in the future of the neighborhood."

Five hundred thousand dollars. Nathan was not good with large numbers, but it seemed that this was a lot of money But there was a problem with the Copy Katz offer. They required that he sign an agreement not to open another copy store in the neighborhood.

He did not have to be in this business. He had gotten into it by chance. In college he had studied music history without ever asking how he would earn a living from that. He wasn't even a musician, as his father always pointed out: "He studies music, but he doesn't play."

So much seemed fated. There was a cosmic string that started with Nathan's fascination with the life of Beethoven and carried for more than twenty years to his big mistake. Would the one have happened without the other? Growing up, Nathan had never heard anything good about anything German except apple strudel, which was said to be Jewish. German was the pariah culture and the ugly language. But then there was the music. What did the words of Schiller mean in the last movement of the Ninth? And for that matter, what wondrously beautiful things were Adam and Eve saying in Haydn's "The Creation"? Nathan wanted to read letters and criticism by Beethoven's contemporaries. Soon he was learning the ugly language to understand beautiful music, learning it with surprising ease, since the German language, like apple strudel, tasted a bit like something Jewish. Not only was it not that ugly, but it bore a surprising similarity to Yiddish, which he had been listening to, though not really understanding, all his life.

As he left the meeting on this Friday, Nathan could not yet see how the German language would direct his destiny, but it was probably the beginning, the first opening without which the mistake probably couldn't have happened two decades later. Life moves in tiny increments, with hidden causes and effects. Beethoven's symphonies had taught him that no note or phrase is without later consequence. The gentle role of an oboe leads to a bellyful of strings, which opens the way for the rampage of a full orchestra. And the oboe had started so quietly. Nothing in life happens suddenly. There were always hidden events that created an opening, started a pathway, like invisible advance men who cannot be controlled because their work is never seen.

Nathan's only instrument was a harmonica, which Harry insisted was not a real instrument. What was worse, he played a classical harmonica. He could play Beethoven violin sonatas on the harmonica. Harry, who not only didn't like harmonicas but disdained classical music, shook his head in despair. His other son, Mordy, also had musical interest, but, even less comprehensible to Harry than a classical harmonica, Mordy composed music on a computer that was played without any musical instruments at all. In fact, since Mordy did not have the equipment, his music was never played. But certainly to Harry it would not have been music.

When Harry complained to his wife about their sons' music, she would burst into an ironic laugh and say, "Oboy,
meshugene gens, meshugene gribbenes." Crazy
parents have crazy children.

Maybe life was entirely
beshirt.
Nathan recalled from college that Kant had said this in his infelicitously titled I
dee zu einer allgemeinen Geschkhte in der weltbürgerlichen Absicht
"What appears to be complicated and accidental in individuals, may yet be understood as a steady, progressive, though slow, evolution of the original endowments of the entire species." Aside from the fact that Nathan's parents hated the way their son could quote Kant and had squandered his education on mastering words such as
weltbürgerlichen,
it was possible that a life was completely shaped by parents who in turn were shaped by grandparents so that a life in the East Village was shaped two hundred years ago by some forgotten incident on the Polish banks of the Vistula River.

Harry, another musician who could not play an instrument, could not see this. He managed the real estate holdings Ruth had inherited from her father. Her father, like Harry, had been a visionary down on his luck. Ruth's father had realized that the children of the Jews in the shops in the Lower East Side were one day going to have money, and when they did, they would move north because in Manhattan history, people had always headed north for better spaces. So he invested everything he had on Avenues A and B, the area just north of the slum. He bought buildings and lots. The building in which the family now lived, large by neighborhood standards, was built by Ruth's father, who had hired a noted 1920s architect. But the father had underestimated his neighbors; they did move north, but much farther than he had imagined—to the Bronx. Once the market crashed in 1929, he was ruined. Most of the Jews in the neighborhood had heard that after the market crash, he had leapt from his fine new building's art deco roof onto the pavement of Avenue A. The story was not true; he had died of illness in 1932, leaving his family with a great deal of unwanted real estate.

Ruth married Harry, an immigrant who always insisted that he had been a music impresario in Warsaw Even when he spoke very little English, he used the word "impresario" with great dexterity, though no one was sure what he meant by it. In New York he tried to produce concerts with stars from the Yiddish theaters on Second Avenue, but no one came. He moved on to jazz and even befriended Charlie Parker, who lived on the other side of Tompkins Square. He never questioned, though many did, how Harry Seltzer was able to mount a Charlie Parker concert. "He's a friend," Harry would explain irritably. Harry helped other people and assumed that other people wanted to help him. But his friend died of a drug overdose only weeks before the concert date, and Harry had to pay back the ticket holders, incurring a debt that took him years to settle. Seeking release from these obligations, he formed the real estate holdings into a corporation for the purpose of declaring bankruptcy. But Ruth would not let him declare bankruptcy, which she insisted was dishonorable.

Harry tried to produce concerts with Chow Mein Vega, but so few people came that it didn't pay for the rental of the hall on Second Avenue and Harry slid further into debt. But Chow Mein had been a big star in the sixties when boogaloo was popular, and Harry never lost faith that boogaloo would one day be big again and when that happened he would be well positioned as an impresario.

In the meantime, Harry managed his wife's real estate inheritance. Many of the lots and buildings were left unoccupied. Nonpaying tenants, squatters, had moved in. In most cases the squatters improved the properties, and since Harry did not have any other customers, he was happy to have them stay. He could not have forced them out in any event because he thought of them as his friends. The only really paying building was the one he lived in. Except for his apartment and Nathan's, they were all rented. Of course, Mrs. Kleinman did not always pay because of her postal problems. Birdie Nagel in 2H, whose name wasn't really Birdie but was always referred to that way because she spent most of her time feeding birds, had not paid since her husband died in the late 1960s. "What am I going to do, evict a nice lady like that?" Harry argued. And it was a good argument. Everyone in the neighborhood had seen evictions—burly men roughly carrying possessions to the street, the door sealed with tape. In this neighborhood, evicted tenants ended up squatting in a building down the block, which chances were Harry owned, or they ended up living on the street in front of the building, like Arnie, who had been evicted ten years earlier from the building around the corner from the pallet on which he now lived.

Harry had offered an apartment to his other son, Mordy. But Mordy who took home a considerable array of women, did not want them scrutinized for ethnic origin by his parents. He settled into an abandoned building on Second Street that he had decorated with trees and vines that he made of papier-mâché and was festooned with sardonic graffiti in dripping letters, most of which he had scrawled himself He had written his favorite message, "Rehab Is for Quitters," on several other buildings, some of which were owned by his parents.

Mordy was the family nogoodnik. Parents always make this mistake. In every family that has two children of the same gender, one is always marked the nogoodnik and the other the allrightnik. The parents so label them at such an early age that they invariably grow up to live out their designated labels.

That was why Mordy had assumed his role as the third generation of failed entrepreneurs but Nathan, feeling the pressure of being the allrightnik, had opened a photocopy store. Nathan was no more capable of charging neighborhood people for photocopies than Harry had been able to charge them rent. But he did manage to charge enough to cover his operating expenses, which were not much because his family owned the building. Artists from the neighborhood—poets, painters, musicians—would come to Nathan because he would not only charge very little, but he could spend an hour or more working with the artist on just the right layout and size for the poster or flyer.

Nathan felt that he should take the half million dollars from Katz, but he also knew that the store that would replace his would not help East Village artists and so it would not contribute to the neighborhood. Instead, it was part of an attempt to drive all of them out and replace them with people like the parents of Sarah's inconstant best friend, Maya.

These were the issues being juggled—several balls too many—in his mind while seated on a contour-molded bench on a downtown F train burrowing under Greenwich Village to a clearly un-Latin beat. It was a fox-trot. Chow Mein would have called it a Jewish beat. One-two, three and four. One-two, three and four. Suddenly the rhythm changed. Somewhere under Manhattan in a dark and barely lit tunnel of rock, the train slowed and then stopped. Nathan felt the oxygen steadily depleting, as though movement had created the oxygen, the same way fish have to keep water moving through their gills to breathe. His heart was throbbing, reverberating through the thick cavities of his frail body, shaking him, thudding loudly enough for the other passengers to hear.

He realized that he was having a heart attack. His body was chilling and heating up at the same time, feeling cold inside while his skin was burning and sweat was pumping out of him at a startling rate. He had to get out of this train before his heart exploded. But the heart attack was only part of the problem. He was suffocating. Drowning. Or he was about to drown, and he could not get to the surface. He had to get out! Yet he could not do anything but remain motionless and pretend that he was perfectly all right—just riding on the subway. Could he scream for help? The act of screaming might save him. Or pounding the conductor's cabin, telling the son of a bitch to move the train
now!
But he could not let people see that he was panicking, because then they might try to restrain him—hold him down. He had to control himself If he seemed in control, he would gain control. He wished he could talk to someone. Normal conversation could bring him back, occupy him until the train started moving.