My Father and His Gangsters

If you can imagine the spirit of a 13-year-old boy who was permanently cut off from his family, wandering in a strange land where a strange language was spoken, bearing a name not his by birth but now forevermore attached to him, you can also imagine what a dark and threatening world it must have seemed to him and how eagerly he would have cleaved to any promise of power. This was my father's condition in 1910. Love brings slow power, but violence, work and money make it come quick. Or so a boy might think.

In New York, not speaking English, my father carried water to the workmen on the girders of the new skyscrapers a-building; then he sewed pants and rented half a bed in a basement, eight hours a day of it, until the garmentworkers' strike. Then he had to give up that damp and musty niche. Then famine. When he left Russia, he left family, home, language and the threatening Cossacks and the czar's cruel army. It was complicated to leave home, to abandon his history. When he left New York now, it was easy. There was nothing behind him but the wild tenements, the jungle of streets and alleys. The strike had brought him starvation, as if to (continued on page 106)Father and His Gangsters(continued from page 95) mock his assumption of the name "Gold." There was no gold in the streets of New York. It was a myth, a lie, like other myths. In the Book, where it said that "the daughters of Zion are proud," was the reproach really against their pride? Wasn't it something else that made God angry? Mere words delude.

Only life teaches. Only life rewards. A Book can punish, but a man must make his own way as best he can.

There had been thugs in New York, willing to hit a boy on the head and take his dollar, but my father knew no gangsters yet. He went west.

A cousin in Canton, Ohio, or perhaps he wasn't really a cousin, discoursed all one night upon the joys of being a peddler. Long hours, low pay, no security. Also (went the cousin's rhapsody) fresh air and horse manure on the shoes. My father, aged 15, borrowed a cart and sold fruit in the street. He wore a cap, corduroy pants and heavy cork-soled boots; he spoke Yiddish, Russian and a bit of English, which was the lingua franca of Canton, Ohio. He attended night school to learn to read.

One day a gangster named Shloimi Spitz sauntered twice around his cart on a gray November corner of Canton. Then, together with his brother Moishe, the silent one, he tipped over the cart. While my father chased oranges, which run fast, and bananas, which wait, the Spitz brothers explained in detail the workings of their insurance agency. Shloimi did the talking. They would protect him from their impulses to tip fruit carts, and also from other insurance agencies. Some of those other insurance agencies were really mean; they tipped over people, too. The Spitz brothers, lifelong gangsters, were much older than my father. They were perhaps 17, and men of the world. Their authority prevailed.

Oddly enough, despite the percentage appropriated by the gangsters, business suddenly began to prosper. My father bought a pair of green shoes, learned arithmetic and read fluently in English, only moving his lips a little. He swaggered up the boardinghouse porches to take girls out walking. He associated his new prosperity with the intervention of his new protectors, the gangsters. Also, although he barely heard of it, a war was beginning in the Old Country, and this had its distant repercussions in the liberal sale of fruit on the street corners of Canton, Ohio.

From one girl in a boardinghouse my father learned that green shoes are not really elegant; in return, she let him try to teach her something, too. Though he was just learning it himself.

He bought a motorcycle. That was truly elegant. The girl let him wear his green shoes. They drove out of the town of Canton on the dusty hilltop road. My father pointed out that the green of his shoes matched the green of the grass. The girl pointed out that the green of his shoes matched the green of the shimmering treetops. My father urged her to test their color sense on the grass just a little farther off the road. They shivered and hugged each other on the damp green earth. My father pointed out that the war might last forever or that a gangster might come to kill him. What could the girl answer to this? She answered what she had probably long ago and deep within decided to answer.

This was not the gold my father had expected to find in the streets of America. It was much better, rich as ripe fruit, as a squirting pear.

My father dealt bravely, like a responsible businessman, with his gangsters. He stood up tall and proud, and paid them off. It was only money. A man threads his way through the hills and valleys with feeling, with hope, and with an alert sense of the possible.

Then one day tragedy struck. But it did not strike my father; it struck one of his gangsters, whose sense of the possible had exceeded the actual. He had wanted to make an empire of the fruit carts of Canton, Ohio. Alexander was a boy when he conquered Greece. Moishe Spitz was a mere youth when he moved to consolidate several insurance companies into one. The discussion became ardent. Moishe grew insulting. The other insurance agent grew equally insulting. Amid all this impoliteness Moishe Spitz got hit on the head in an argument about insurance routes and neighborhoods. The other insurance salesman kicked him where he lay and went off to his own boardinghouse. Moishe remained on the ground until Shloimi found him, carried him home and put him to bed for a few days. The two gangsters shared the same double-sized bed.

My father suffered dizzy spells from his trips onto the green grass with the tailor's assistant, but had a good appetite and slept soundly. Moishe suffered dizzy spells, slept poorly, pushed his plate away untouched. He suffered his headaches in silence. More than ever he disliked conversation. Shloimi did the talking. Now Shloimi held his brother's hand, because he sometimes fell, and the two gangsters strolled hand in hand, like lovers, on their missions of extortion. Moishe had a headache. My father gave him an orange from the cart to suck. Moishe had a thirst which never went away.

One day my father heard a suggestion from a neighborhood personage, the justice of the peace. "Enlist in the Army," he said, "and you will become a citizen. Also you will see Europe, because there is sure to be war."

"Is always war."

"This great land of ours will go again to the grand test, my lad." He paused before giving a sketch of the recent grand test against Pancho Villa. "Are you listening, lad? You have the look of a person who is not paying close attention. We judges sometimes call that Contempt of the Court. But there is nothing on this earth, other than a proud contempt for Darwinism, which so unites a people as service in the Armed Forces.... What, what are you dreaming about, Sam?"

"Citizen?" my father asked. It was an odd idea. To his knowledge he had never been a citizen.

He sold the cart and enlisted in the Army. They turned him down at the last moment because he was barely 16, although an orphan businessman during a long life in America. He bought back a larger cart, one with rubber wheels.

During this period of decision Moishe Spitz had temporarily let go of his brother Shloimi's hand and gone to stab the insurance agent who had knocked him on the head. Oddly enough, he remembered to take a knife with him. He stabbed him dead and was consequently waiting to be executed in the Ohio State penitentiary. My father went to visit him. A man owes this at least to his own extortionist. "Enlist in the Army," my father advised him.

"They won't take me," Moishe said mournfully. "I get these headaches." They were going to electrocute him instead.

"Would you like some marzipan?" my father asked, extending the box to the guard. The guard bit one candy, chewed, nodded, index finger raised with judiciary authority. Then he lowered it into the box, closed about a handful, and allowed the rest to be passed to Moishe.

At about this time my father also decided to leave Canton, but for the big city, either Cleveland or Indianapolis. He said goodbye to his gangsters. Moishe was just 18 when he was electrocuted. Shloimi, in despair, wept a whole night through. His brother would never know the joys of being grown-up in America. My father tried to comfort him by pointing out that life is valuable to the individual, but not particularly exceptional when you consider the race. What he actually said was: "Tch, tch. It's terrible. Well, what can you do?" Boohoo, said Shloimi. What he meant was: Grief knows no general forms; my grief is unique. He seemed inconsolable. Then he went to Detroit.

• • •

In Cleveland some years later, my father found himself married and a father. He had forgotten the girl whom he had (continued on page 186)Father and His Gangsters(continued from page 106) courted with green shoes. Canton seemed as far away as Kamenets Podol-ski. He sometimes missed his carefree evenings on the motorcycle, zooming up the gentle hills outside Canton, looking for a patch of dry grass, but as always, he lived in the present. The sun and the moon and fresh fruits and vegetables are eternal. Also the pay-off. He had grown accustomed to regular contributions toward keeping his truck from being tipped over; he now had his own store, one not on wheels, and drove his truck through the dawn streets of Lakewood toward the West Side Market, where he picked up his load of iceberg lettuce, oranges, artichokes, the produce of the season. He occasionally also arranged not to be beaten up. As part of his business expenses he included gifts to the police, who otherwise discovered or invented violations of the law, and the fire and building departments; these gangsters spoke English clearly. The market gangsters spoke with eastern European or southern European accents. My father learned to smile and pay. He had four sons. That, too, was a ransom. He, like other businessmen, managed to bargain for the unbargainable—life and the right to live. They found a field of agreement. Balance was possible. The gangsters knew the limits, too.

Then, in the early Thirties, a new breed of gangster moved in. Where they had been waiting, no one knew, though certainly some came off the piers from the fast motorboats which had carried whiskey from Canada into Toledo and Cleveland; and some who were more scholarly had tried their skill at distilling alcohol in the research laboratories of Canton, southern Ohio and Kentucky. The end of Prohibition made them nervous. They came blinking off their launches, out of their red barns. They sought new careers. Sometimes the dream comes true in America. Without great delay their sincere desire to be predators was crowned by success. Thus entered the racketeer.

For my father, "gangster" was a familiar thing; the racketeer was a menace. These men pretended to be labor organizers, extorting dues and bribes from employees and employer. They could ply their trade openly under the guise of the union. They learned that a social institution beats individual enterprise two ways going. They took tribute from workers under the name of dues; they demanded payment from employers in order not to call a strike. With the natural conservatism of a man with a house, wife, family, a sheepskin jacket for going to the market and an extra suit for important occasions, my father resisted the new style. Gangster yes—racketeer no. He was stubborn and told the police he had been threatened. They told him to report back at once if someone broke his arm or dropped a brick on his head.

"Yah," he said.

"You remember now," said the cop. "Say, Sam, my kids sure loved that barrel of old no-good stuck-together candy you sent over. Now it's all gone."

"Yah," said my father. "I think I got another."

He found a bushel of rock candy in the back room of the store, shrugged, dashed a glass of water into it and told Caruso, his driver, to deliver it to Officer Cecil.

One evening I had the mumps and lay alone in my room, aged ten, listening to the dance band from the Hotel Cleveland and wishing I were grown-up so that I could make sense of that tinkle of glass and laughter, those mechanical rhythms. I knew the child's perverse nostalgia for the future—for the dancing, the absurd smiling, all the masquerades to come. I had heard about lust and, slightly feverish, developed an idea of what it might be. My face was as round as a turnip and the purple swellings on my neck took the fun out of swallowing. Suddenly a rock came sailing through the closed window, shattering glass. I swallowed. Before I could yell, my father was in the room, picking up the rock and cursing. My mother swept up the glass. There was no note on the rock, but the message was clear. The union intended serious negotiation.

My father telephoned the police, who said, "Kids. Halloween is only two months away. Crazy kids."

"Officer Cecil," said my father, "listen, I sent you the candy."

"It was all stuck together anyway, Sam, but my kids loved it. They broke it up with hammers. I tell you there's nothing I could do. It's higher up. So you know what you got to do."

"Ach, I hate it."

"Well, they talk your language, Sam. From the Old Country, ain't they? Don't blame it on me. I didn't let in all the riffraff, Sammy."

My father put the earpiece back on the hook, sat for a while over the telephone, shouted at my brothers: "Nobody walks barefoot in this house! Use the vacuum first!" Then he sat for a while longer. My mother tiptoed around him. My three brothers stood in a row, six shoes watching him although he showed very little. Then he sighed and used the telephone again. No response. For a time there would be nobody home in the office. They were following a traditional ritual in the racketeer business. They were temporarily unavailable for consultation. My brothers were silent and frightened, I was excited, my mother was wild. Someplace in the racketeer's manual it says that you don't have to worry about the man; the woman gets wild, the children get nervous because their mother is wild, and the man can't stand the noise and strain, no matter what else he can stand.

Still, my father was stubborn. "They got no right," he said.

"Rights, rights!" my mother shouted. "With dead children you'll give them an argument?"

"Look, I tried to call them," my father said. "They don't answer. Just don't go up to the races without I ..." He lost his grasp of English. "I'm doing all I can, so don't ask me anymore."

He sat up all night on the front porch, wearing his sheepskin jacket, a sentry on duty on Hathaway Avenue in Lakewood, Ohio.

Next day, still with the mumps I lay, and a boarded window. My father was sleeping on the couch. He had been up all night; he had worked all day. A bottle, filled with fluid, came sailing through the other window. The window broke; the bottle broke. "Foo, foo, fooey," said my father. It had a bad smell. He described it as a stink bomb, but it was homemade, home-created and relatively mild. Still, no one could claim it smelled good.

He made another telephone call. It was the hour of arbitration. This time the racketeer's manual must have said: OK, discuss. And who visited our house that night to perch with his plump white hands on his short thighs? Who came to squeak out threats and apologies and an incoherent rumble of promises? Who was the collection agent and negotiator for the racketeers? Answer: an old friend. Shloimi Spitz, the gangster.

"Shloimi," said my father, "that was my boy in that room, he had the mumps, a shock like that could prevent him from becoming a father."

"He's too young for monkey business." said Shloimi, who knew nothing of psychology or psychosomatic medicine except that a brick, a stone or a bomb through the window made people reasonable. "What's a baby like that want to be a father?"

"Shloimi," said my father reproachfully, "I went to visit your brother on death row."

"Nu, so how long I got to be grateful?"

"A little bit anyway," said my father.

"All right, so I'm grateful. Now pay up your dues."

"Dues!"

"That's what we call them, dues. Dues me something."

"Oy," said my father.

"You want to call them something else, that's your privilege, I invite you," said Shloimi, softened despite himself by the reminder of silent, dizzy Moishe, cut off in his prime by a jolt of electricity from the State of Ohio. "I'll tell you what, Sam, you're such an old friend, you can call them anything. How's that for an arrangement? Just so long as you pay."

"I guess I'll call them dues," my father said sullenly.

Shloimi smiled. In a movie he'd have had some spectacular gesture—his leitmotif—such as George Raft's flipping a quarter or Edward G. Robinson's delicious snarl. Instead, he merely smiled. But then, lo! He showed his gold tooth. He had a gold-tooth gesture! "What's the matter with your kid?" he asked, taking notice of me.

"He's getting over the mumps."

"OK, but why his mouth hang open like that?"

I shut my mouth and Shloimi put his hand on my head. He tousled my hair. "OK, nice kid," he said. "They didn't know they was putting the stink in his room. If they knew he was sick, they'd have said, Wait till the kid isn't sick. I personally would say it."

My jaw was hanging again.

• • •

Now pass summarily over the War, age, events. But time cannot be passed over; time passes us and we remain in our history as it hurtles forward. Still, it is now 1966. I live in San Francisco; my parents still live in Cleveland, Ohio. My father is heading toward his 70th year. In Los Angeles his kid brother has a 40th wedding anniversary. All the relatives gather—the automobile agency, the liquor stores, the doctors and lawyers, the hypochondriacs, the one alcoholic (a heavy drinker), the successful children and the ones who have not yet become successful. My father keeps active. After the party, he wants to go to Las Vegas to gamble. Money has always been a toy to him, and gambling better than any other activity expresses the playfulness resident in the commodity money. The smell of green, its taste and crinkle, still give him pleasure. After a large family party he wants to have some fun.

My father asked me to join my mother and him for a few days at the Auberge Sandy Dunes (let us call it), one of the piles of pink masonry and violations of symmetry which make up the Las Vegas strip. I stayed two nights, and then we all left for the airport. The visit, I noticed, was an economical one. When the check arrived at the hotel night club, it was marked Compliments, with a red, smeared, inky stamp. My bill was stamped Compliments and so was my parents'. When he strolled from the cages where he exchanged money for chips, and when he idled among the crap tables, my father was treated with unusual consideration by the girls who brought him lemonade.

On the third day we stood in the lobby with our luggage, waiting to go. My mother and I were amazed that there was no bill. Then old Shloimi Spitz came strolling out of his office, alerted by a buzzer. He had shrunk, as the old do, but his bald head with its freckled crown seemed larger, almost dignified. Sober dignity; also a white-on-white silk tie over the white-on-white shirt with ruffles and French cuffs. He was wearing a black Italian silk suit and pointy shoes. The narrow pants gave evidence of the withering his years had brought him. I remembered him as thick-thighed. He had had a bad cold recently; the flanges of his nose were chapped and there was a pale white shadow of lanolin cream about his nostrils.

"Hallo, Sam," he said to my father.

"Hallo, Shloimi," said my father. "I heard you was here."

"You're looking good," said Shloimi.

"You got a good business here," said my father. "How are you?"

"Not too bad. I get a little sinus sometimes. Come here, Sam, I want to talk to you." The two old men strolled across the lobby, arm in arm. "It's not really my business, Sam. It's a little group of us---"

And they were beyond my hearing. They had the quick waddle of healthy old men. Shloimi was talking, but why? Did he want to recall the memory of his brother, Moishe, dead nearly 50 years now? Had he some need to apologize for the threats and extortions which had bound my father and him together so long?

In the taxi my mother asked, "Did you thank him for the Complimentary?"

"Naw," said my father, and fell to dreaming.

"Well, you should—learn to be polite!" said my mother.

"Naw," said my father.

Shloimi stood spraddle-legged in the curved driveway of the Auberge Sandy Dunes while the hot wind of far Nevada swept over him. He lifted his hand, waving goodbye to my father. I would have liked my father to let the power window of the air-conditioned taxi float down; I wanted him to lean out and wave in return. Instead, my father just moved his head in recognition. Shloimi smiled. He gave all he could. He stood in the heat and smiled with all his might. An old man smiling hard. He showed his gold tooth.

We had already turned onto the road when my father changed his mind, turned, and waved goodbye to his gangster. Too late. We were out of sight.

"I don't owe him," said my father, and pressed his lips together as if he understood that his words—the truth of them—hid a different and deeper truth. Life had joined them in a mutual debt. Now at the end of time, the most important fact in their past was that they had known one another.