The padrones — they don’t deal with cement — that’s manual work. They do the brain work: they think. The manual work is left to the junior members of the Family, the ones still doing apprenticeships. It’s casual work. The sucker goes home at night, not a worry in the world, doesn’t suspect anything. Ten steps behind comes the casual worker, the apprentice. A car is waiting on the corner. The apprentice carries an iron crowbar under his coat. The bar has a hook on the end that’s no bigger than your bent index finger. Once on the corner, the trick is to sink the sharp end of the crowbar into the sucker’s skull … one quick move and it’s done. No waiting, no argument. The guy collapses, just like that, then you grab him round the waist. You drag him into the car, take him down to the river where there’s a box waiting. You tenderly deposit the happily departed in the box, fill up with liquid cement, nail the box down, and slide it into the water. The cops say there are dozens of them sitting at the bottom of the Hudson. It’s like — you remember the story from the old country? — Attila’s coffin. It’s teamwork and it needs proper apprentices. But you take great care! Whatever the padrone says, you just keep saying, “No thank you, not my line of work.” You stick to your job in the garage. You’re a garage hand. We Zala folk must look out for each other.
It’s not impossible, of course, that later you make it big yourself. Like, that’s something else. But you have to know your stuff. Avoid the bars on Thirty-eighth, they’re not for you. There’s always work available, but have nothing to do with them. For example they might want a persuader. You know, the kind of guy who goes to the sucker and persuades him to pay twenty-five percent a week for the loan. Avoid them too, but be polite about it. Just tell them you can’t take the djob because your accent is not up to full New York level. Accent is a big problem to them. These black guys wouldn’t accept me in the band on account of my accent … me, who back home drummed for Tito when he visited Budapest. That was before ’48, before the radio started howling on about Tito and his revisionist traitor dogs! The black guys said I drummed with an accent, my sticks were wrong. That’s what I mean by accent — it’s just jealousy and racism. That’s my biggest regret. What else could I do, I got this job as a bartender. So now you know. Sit down and enjoy yourself, I’ll pour you another.
Go on, stay, there is plenty of time. This hour of the day, after supper, there are few customers, at least till the theaters empty. We don’t get cement trade here, anyway. Our customers are writers of one sort or another. It’s not manual work like cement, but the pay’s pretty hot. What’s that? You’d like a go yourself? Go ahead, try. Who knows, you might strike it lucky, but it won’t be easy. My experience, here in Manhattan, is that books are big-time.
You get to see a lot of life from behind a bar. After midnight, with the third martini down them, the one they put against expenses because it’s part of the job, about midnight or so, among themselves, they talk pretty freely, these writers. I listen to them and think what big business it is here. It’s not like over the Pond, in Rome, or in Budapest. My guardian angel, I called her “Sweetheart,” whose photo I keep on the shelf — you see, I even got her a silver frame from Woolworth’s — she told me she knew a writer back home who no longer wanted to write because he had grown sick of books. He really did feel sick and wanted to heave up each time he thought about it. The only things he still read were those crazy dictionaries. He must have been a weird creature, an oddment, like the Chinese deer at the Bronx Zoo.
The patrons here in New York are not that sort of writer. They don’t actually write anything, but immediately sell what they haven’t yet written. They earn a mint from books. They usually start arriving past eleven, when the nearby shows have finished. They soak up the drink, straight bourbons, every time. There’s a regular, a little fat guy, who must be a real big-shot writer, because he even has a secretary and a lot of hangers-on with him, who are all ears when he talks. Whenever he says something they’re all attention, like a congregation in church when the priest raises the host. I saw it with my own two eyes the time he thought of a title and the guy, his secretary, was straight on the line, selling it. He came back out of breath saying he had sold the title for two hundred thousand, a story his boss hadn’t yet written and had only just thought of, one he’d maybe write, if the inspiration came. Everyone drank to the good news and when they left they left me twenty on the tray. That’s because big-shot writers are always surrounded by pals. There’s some really cute women in the gang too. If you really fancy writing I could introduce you to one of them.
I don’t read books myself, that’s not my thing. I’m happy enough to leaf through a good thriller, or the comics — you know, where the chick lies naked on the couch without a clue that her sexy days are over and her problems are just beginning. And her pimp leans over her, a knife in his hand, and there’s a talk bubble that says, “There’s nothing wrong with her, it’s just a bit of blood on her neck.” I like that kind of thing. Thrillers are good because the writers don’t smuggle in clever stuff — the reader gets it straightaway, without the crap.
Go on, relax, have another — your bludimari is there, right by your hand. The boss? Don’t worry about him. He’s there behind that glass door, in the back room. Yes, the guy with the glasses … He’s doing the accounts, not looking this way. Solid guy: a Mormon. No liquor, only warm water from a heavy-bottomed glass. And he won’t smoke — he’s above all that. He brought nothing from Utah, where his lot live, to New York, except his Bible and his Mormon ways, like having two wives. The second he picked up here, in Manhattan. Owns a chain of eight bars, two in Harlem. But our place here on the corner of Broadway is the smartest.
Because, you know, there are two theaters nearby. One where they sing and one where they just talk. Sometimes when they talk so much it gets to be a drag and the audience grow bored and walk out. I’ve not been in either so far, but one day I paid up a Franklin for the one that was all talk. Why shouldn’t I be an angel, I thought — you have to support art. Don’t know what angels are? People who finance a play. Investors. Drivers, hotel porters, headwaiters, they all want to be angels when there’s a play starting on Broadway. But this one was no good, I wasted a hundred. There was a lot of talking on stage — too much. It’s better when there’s some nice upbeat music, a high-kicking chorus and singers, that kind of thing. I’m not investing in writers or literature again. A man’s better off playing the numbers game. So you just wait and serve your turn in the garage.