Of all the picaresque characters to frequent Len’s Clothing Store, there was none whose visits I welcomed more than Abe Hirshberg’s. Abe was the last of the red-hot ethnic stereotypes, a salty-tongued refugee from the garment district who worked as a jobber, haunting the least charming districts in the city hawking odd lots of clothing known as closeouts to small-time merchants like Len. It was merchandise in styles that had not so much been discontinued or superseded as repudiated. This was in the days before discount chains like Wal-Mart wiped establishments like Len’s off the face of the earth and put jobbers like Abe out to pasture for good.
Abe tooled around in a cruiser-class Lincoln Continental stocked to the gills with off-brand merchandise that ranged from the nonessential to the farcical: shirts that were already three years out of fashion, long-extinct fads like pedal pushers or Dr. Kildare jackets—briefly a hit among teenagers—and other well-traveled flotsam and jetsam of this general ilk. Abe hated opening the trunk of his car, because if he didn’t sell a substantial portion of its contents by the time he left, he would need at least two people to sit on it and get it closed again. And that meant forking over a tip.
Abe was about sixty-five when I met him: short, bespectacled, wrinkled in places where no wrinkles should exist. Half the time he spoke in English, the rest of the time in Yiddish. In either vernacular, his conversation was a nonstop string of threats, execrations, epithets, exclamations, exaggerations, exhortations, oaths, and heartrending appeals for mercy. He swung wildly back and forth between Willy Loman, the Merchant of Venice, and the Iceman (that Cometh). He was fond of invoking the God of Israel and invariably likened his private-sector misfortunes to the destruction of the Temple. He thought of Len as a cross between Charles Atlas, George Reeves, Adolf Eichmann, and the emperor Titus. He was perpetually scribbling illegible notes in an elephantine notebook that had hundreds of bits of paper sticking out if it, writing down orders that had not yet been agreed upon, as if the very act of committing them to paper invested them with legal finality. The notebook contained so many orders, one would have thought Abe was a millionaire many times over, that in visiting us in East Falls, he was merely slumming it. This is the way he looked at it, too. From the first time I saw him, I understood that, in Abe’s view, deigning to set foot in a two-bit dive like Len’s Clothing Store was an act of supreme altruism—because he had places to go and people to meet. Interesting places. Important people. Not tightwad sons of bitches like Len Mohr, spawn of an accursed race, who would literally make that poor son of a bitch George Washington scream for mercy before he’d part with a goddamn dollar bill earned at his hole-in-the-wall dump and all-purpose shit hole, the prick Hun bastard.
“I have tickets to the theater. My wife is waiting for me at the front door,” Abe would say. “Please: Nineteen dollars a dozen is my best offer.”
Len would tell him to pack up his lurid castoffs and get lost.
“You are crucifying me!” Abe would tell Len tearfully when he refused to take the nightmarish merchandise off his hands. “You are literally drinking my blood.”
At this juncture, Abe would protest that the Wanamakers and the Bloomingdales and the Lords and the Taylors and all of his other imaginary contacts in the haberdashery stratosphere never treated him like this, that the abuse he was enduring tonight—tantamount to lèse-majesté—was beyond the pale. When this failed to produce the desired effect, which it usually did, he would ostentatiously ferret out his fancy gold watch and gaze at it with an expression of mock terror, as if ten more minutes of pointless dickering with a cheapskate ballbuster like Len Mohr would compel him to cancel his long-anticipated nightcap with the Maharini of Annapur.
Nobody else talked to Len like this. Everybody else treated him with boundless respect and admiration, bordering on fear. Not Abe. Because of Len’s tenacious refusal to part with his money and because of his Teutonic background, and because of, well, everything, Abe viewed him as Antiochus himself, scourge of the Israelites.
“Open my veins, go ahead!” he would shriek at the top of his voice. “Put my head under the wheel and run over it, you bastard.”
The first time I saw Len and Abe in action, I was only nine years old. It was a Saturday night, just before closing time, and Len and I were turning out the lights. Suddenly, I heard the sound of something incredibly heavy being dragged up the front steps. Now the outer door creaked opened. Heavy breathing, more sounds of scraping and dragging. Then the inside door burst open and in lurched a short, perspiring old man, dragging what was easily the planet’s oldest, largest, filthiest suitcase behind him. It looked like a going-away present he’d been handed by the prophet Elijah after his well-attended bar mitzvah in 874 B.C.
“Get out of here, and take that garbage with you!” Len would bark, making a half hearted attempt to block his path. “We’re closing.”
“Five minutes is all I ask!” Abe would thunder, mopping his brow and feigning his twelfth coronary. “Five minutes—is this too much to ask?”
Len would then relent, and Abe would wearily undo the leather straps that bound the suitcase together. From within its fearsome recesses would cascade a tsunami of down-market merchandise. It suggested that Abe had made a Faustian bargain with a Mephistophelian middleman who agreed to provide unlimited access to clothing nobody wanted in exchange for his everlasting soul.
Pledge me your wife’s soul and I’ll throw in some manufacturer’s seconds closeout hosiery
.
When I think of Len today, I picture him and Abe Hirschberg screaming epithets at each other as Abe scuttles down the staircase with his suitcase in tow.
Two-fifty a shirt is my last offer. They’re pink; how am I going to sell pink shirts to Polacks? At my age, do you think I enjoy this? That’s your problem. Do you think I need such melodrama? That’s also your problem. Twenty-nine bucks a dozen, with three XLs, and you’ve got yourself a deal. Careful, Abe: Don’t go flying ass-over-tin-cups. Twenty-nine bucks, that’s the best I can do for you. Well, that’s not good enough. For this I drove all the way here on my weekend? Apparently. For this I drove twenty-five miles out of my way? So it would appear. And don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out. You goy son of a bitch. Same to you
,
Schweinhund. Make it four XLs and you’ve got yourself a deal. Fine, but at this price, I must be meshugah. Done, you prick. But I am only doing this because my wife is waiting at the front door with my sickly grandchildren. Did I tell you Esther has pleurisy? I thought it was leprosy
. In the end, after witnessing scores of these bravura performances, I realized that these two men were in love with each other, joined at the retail hip. In the best of all possible worlds, they would have been buried side by side in a cemetery that admitted only grand masters of feigned ethnic antagonism.
But then again, who needs the aggravation?
One afternoon, completely out of the blue, Len announced that he had invested in a company founded by a group of local businessmen that would provide financial backing for a promising young boxer. By the sound of it, most of the other men in the Cloverlay group were high rollers. I am not sure how or when Len and these captains of industry crossed paths or whether he merely purchased a few shares of stock that they issued, but I assume the whole thing had something to do with the boxing matches Len used to referee in clubs in North Philadelphia. The boxer in question was a hard-hitting brute who had taken the gold medal in the 1964 Olympics but was now slaving away in a local slaughterhouse. The backing company, by tossing a few clams his way, would enable him to quit his job and focus on his real objective, which at this early stage was to turn professional and wangle a rematch with the one fighter who had bested him in the Olympic tryouts a few years earlier. The man who prevailed in that three-round set-to went by the name of Buster Mathis. The man he outpointed was named Joe Frazier.
Because I was only a kid at the time, because I knew nothing about boxing, and because I had no way of knowing that Joe Frazier would one day become the heavyweight champion of the world, I didn’t think much of this venture. When Len would talk about perhaps dropping by the North Philadelphia gym where Smokin’ Joe worked out, I expressed no great interest in going. This may have been because Len used to ref fights in a gym nicknamed the Blood Pit, and this didn’t sound like the sort of place a pasty-faced teenaged boy would feel comfortable.
For the next few years, Len would simply not give the Smokin’ Joe Frazier saga a rest. Just as the Nifty Fifty had dominated our conversations a few years earlier, Len now had a bee in his bonnet about the fearsome young bull in the Cloverlay stable. Not every kid gets to work for a man who is one of the original backers of a future heavyweight champion of the world, and even as a teen, I should have realized that there was something special about this. But at the time I didn’t care one way or the other. Like most young people of the era, I would soon become contemptuous of Frazier—unfairly, I realize in retrospect—and idolize Muhammad Ali, not only because of what the former Cassius Clay seemed to stand for but because young people are so easily bowled over by the kind of high-profile insolence Clay was famous for.
Slowly, just beneath the surface, tension began to develop between Len and me. Just as every son has to kill his father, I now had to kill my surrogate father. Though I respectfully stayed abreast of Frazier’s progress as he disposed of a series of stumblebums, then an Argentinian slugger named Oscar Bonavena, then a gifted but undersized veteran named Eddie Machen, I did so with no great enthusiasm. Things were changing on other fronts as well; I was, in the words of my employer, “feeling my oats.” I questioned the wisdom of escalating the war in Vietnam. I spoke my mind about Nixon and Eisenhower. I upbraided Len for using terms like “
Schwärze
” and “Jewish lightning.” I stopped reading ostensibly enlightening articles he had circled in
U.S. News & World Report.
All of a sudden, I knew everything.
Len and I never reached the point where we openly feuded or ceased to enjoy each other’s company. But things did change. From the beginning, Len could not understand why anyone in his right mind would want to be a priest. He was even less clear as to why anyone would devour novels by Faulkner and Fitzgerald when he could more profitably devote his time to biographies of Andrew Carnegie or books with diagrams depicting Alexander the Great’s brain in its prime, before Aristotle’s most celebrated student started hitting the hard stuff.
Len knew that I was not enthralled by retail. He could see that I was bored silly by all the Frazier hoopla, that like everybody else under the age of twenty-five, I was solidly in Ali’s corner. He could sense that a wedge had developed between us. Earlier, things had been different. When I was about twelve and my father’s drinking was getting completely out of hand, Len had proposed adopting me, or at least arranging for me to spend my final year before entering the seminary in his home. Because there was no real social congress between Len and my father, I have no idea how these negotiations would have proceeded. I only know that after we moved out of the project and across town when I was thirteen and I stopped working for Len every day after school, the adoption talk ceased. Now I saw him only once a week, taking a long bus ride from my new neighborhood back to the old one. He continued to pay me $6 a week, though now I was earning in a single day what I had previously been paid for twenty hours of work. But after a few years, I wearied of the long commute and grew tired of giving up my Saturdays. I had new friends now, and I wanted to spend more time with them. One day I was offered a job as a clerk in a pharmacy in my new neighborhood. I accepted it. Breaking the news to Len was the hardest thing I ever had to tell anyone in my life.
I visited the store a few times during my last two years in high school, dropping by to purchase clothes, which he always sold me at a ridiculous discount, and I stopped in a few times after I entered college. After that, our paths parted. Years passed. My mother said she’d heard through the grapevine that he eventually retired to Florida, but I had trouble believing this, because Len never took vacations, wasn’t crazy about direct sunlight, and seemed to be the kind of man who was born to die in the retail saddle. He lived to be ninety-one, just like his father before him. But after that visit in 1971, I never saw him again.
I have often asked myself why I never went back to visit Len after I left college. Perhaps it is because of the ruthlessness of the young, the obsession with staking out one’s own terrain, escaping from the patriarch’s shadow. Moreover, I did not want to be reminded of the past, and East Falls held almost nothing but bad memories. Most likely, I did not want to see Len again until I had made my mark as a writer, an occupation he had always disparaged, and by the time that happened, he had left the stage. Ironically, I achieved professional and financial success at the same age as Len: in my late thirties. Success was the theme that dominated our relationship; it was the thread connecting all our conversations. In the World According to Len Mohr, it was better to fail at something you wanted to do than succeed at something you didn’t; success on anyone’s terms other than your own was failure. I had no quarrel with these axioms, which proved a steady source of inspiration during the long years I could not get anyone to publish my work because I wanted to write like this and they wanted me to write like that. But by the time I was successful, Len’s store had been shuttered.
Throughout my relationship with Len, I understood exactly what I was getting out of it: six bucks a week and a daily trip through the looking glass. But what did he get out of it? I never knew. I could never pinpoint what Len saw in me, since my father had done such a superb job convincing his children of their inherent worthlessness. Perhaps he detected something in my personality—orneriness—that he liked because it mirrored the orneriness in him. Or perhaps this was not a trait he had detected but one he had spawned. The negative side of the relationship was that Len could never stop thinking of me as a child. This became apparent the last time I saw him, when I was twenty years old and brought along my latest girlfriend to meet him. The reception was cool; he was cordial but by no means effervescent. I may not have realized it earlier, but I realized it then: Len was devastated when our seven-year liaison came to an end. He did not go out and find another stock clerk to replace me. He did not bring any new protégés on board. He was no longer in the market for surrogate sons. And when I went to see him that final time, I could see that it was the boy that he missed, not the man I had become.